Opinion: Wisconsin farmers struggling amid trade wars and broken promises

From Trump’s trade wars to slashed programs and support for big corporations, Congressman Van Orden is backing policies that hurt Wisconsin farmers.

Many Wisconsin farmers voted for US Rep. Derrick Van Orden and President Donald Trump because they were promised less regulation and greater prosperity. The hard truth is that Trump’s DOGE efforts, tariff wars and the USAID shutdown are all hurting Wisconsin farmers. Congressman Van Orden continues to support policies that harm farmers by:

Provoking harmful trade wars: Trump’s tariffs on Canada have caused American grain growers to lose contracts with long-time Canadian buyers. Canadian buyers can’t trust the instability of US exports with Trump in office, and Canadians are just flat-out angry and are avoiding US made and produced goods, including farm products. Meanwhile, Americans need to keep buying a majority of their potash — a key component of fertilizers — from Canada, meaning that tariffs stand to jack up costs for American farmers. The harm of trade wars go beyond Canada, too; US crop farmers are freaked out over the trade wars since Canada, China, and Mexico represent half of all US agricultural exports. Farmers remember what happened in the first Trump Administration, where US agricultural exports to China were cut in half because of Trump’s trade war with China.

Breaking crucial government services: Corn and soybean farmers are upset because Trump canceled over $3 billion in grants that were supposed to help them adopt practices like no-till and cover cropping. Farmers are left holding the bag here — many farmers had already borrowed the funds for these investments, with the expectation that they would receive grants that had already been announced once the projects were underway. What’s more, Trump’s destruction of USAID further takes $2 billion straight out of American farmers’ pockets. The USAID Food for Peace program used to purchase rice, wheat, corn, and soy from farmers and distribute them to hungry nations. The Trump Administration has also caused key research and development efforts to shutter, such as the Soybean Innovation Labs that were helping to develop new genetics and growing practices in soybeans — terrible news for farmers in the third largest soybean-growing state in the nation.

Allowing big businesses to fleece farmers: For decades, we’ve watched as small farms and family farmers have been driven out of the industry, in favor of multinational corporations that have swooped in. Trump and Van Orden are instead making it easier for big businesses to rip farmers off even more. For example, the Trump Administration is removing safeguards to protect farmers from predatory lenders and rolling back rules that would have increased transparency around credit access for family farms. And while input expenses keep going up for ordinary farmers, Trump and Van Orden are laser-focused on giving a tax cut to millionaires like John Deere’s CEO. That’s not building an economy that works for farmers — it’s maintaining an economy that works for the very people that have destroyed our rural Wisconsin way of life.

It pains me to see Wisconsin farmers and our farm communities needlessly and thoughtlessly being impacted by this. We should expect better from our representatives in Congress. Derek Van Orden is supposed to be defending us in Washington, DC, but instead he is supporting these reckless actions. Congressman Van Orden talks a good game about supporting agriculture in Wisconsin, but his actions are making farmers suffer. We must demand better.