President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that his administration will provide $12 billion to American farmers to help them deal with “temporary trade market disruptions” caused by tariffs and trade disputes with other countries and increased production costs caused by former President Joe Biden’s policies.
During a meeting with farmers at the White House on December 8, Trump said, “I’m delighted to announce this afternoon that the United States will be taking a small portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars we receive in tariffs.”
“They’re the backbone of our great people,” Trump stated. “We’re going to use that money to provide $12 billion in economic assistance to American farmers.”
In a recent press release, the Department of Agriculture confirmed that the $12 billion in economic assistance for American Farmers will include $11 billion for the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program and $1 billion for farmers who produce crops not included as part of the broader program.
The president explained that the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program will “provide much-needed certainty to farmers as they get this year’s harvest to market and look ahead to next year’s crops, and it’ll help them continue their efforts to lower food prices for American families.”
“FBA will help address market disruptions, elevated input costs, persistent inflation, and market losses from foreign competitors engaging in unfair trade practices that impede exports,” the Department of Agriculture stated in the press release following the president’s meeting. “The FBA Program applies simple, proportional support to producers using a uniform formula to cover a portion of modeled losses during the 2025 crop year.”
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In a recent interview on Fox Business, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins highlighted the president’s December 8 meeting with “real farmers” at the White House. Rollins explained that the Trump administration and the farmers at the meeting discussed the “mess” that was “inherited” from the Biden administration and how Trump is working to “change the trajectory of agriculture” in the United States.
“In the farming community, it is real,” Rollins told Fox Business. “The cost of labor, the cost of interest rates for their loans, which they have to have, the cost of fertilizer, the cost of seed… and what the president is doing to completely change the trajectory of agriculture in America.”
