Scott Brown knows exactly what a bad year looks like, but this one is different. Standing in Arkansas fields he’s worked his whole life, he breaks down the math that keeps him awake at night. “Just say I was at all soybeans and a $150 an acre loss. You’re looking at $450,000 a loss. For just doing my job,” he says. “I’m paying an additional $450,000 instead of making anything. I’ve never seen a crisis like this. Without intervention, we’re talking about generational loss of farmers.”
Farm bankruptcies in Arkansas have almost doubled in the last year. Most national coverage blames Trump’s trade war with China, and the hope is that once trade talks cool down, the crisis will let up. Farmers here say that the story misses the point entirely.
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One farmer explains it with blunt honesty. “The tariffs are a problem, but think of it as being in a coffin. And we’re going to nail the lid shut. The tariffs are the final nail.” Another puts it simply. “This crisis was here before he did the tariff thing. This is a crisis that’s been building for decades.”
Their argument is that a handful of massive companies have built a system where they win no matter what. Farmers scrape by, and taxpayers unknowingly fund the setup. As one farmer says, “They’re just laundering tax money. None of it stays in the local community.”
What’s happening is the result of a slow, steady consolidation of the entire farm economy. Seed companies that once numbered in the dozens have merged into only a few. The same goes for fertilizer suppliers and machinery manufacturers. “When I started farming, we had five or six Arkansas-based seed companies,” one farmer recalls. “Now, there’s none.”
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Meanwhile, prices for soybeans, cotton, corn, and rice have plunged. The losses are brutal. Farmers say they’re often paying more to plant and harvest than they’ll ever make back. And when they do get an aid package, “That money will never come to me,” one farmer says. “It comes straight through my hands into whoever I owe the money to.”
The human cost is shattering. At a crowded emergency meeting, one lender told the room, “Five of my customers have committed suicide. That’s how serious that this is.” Another farmer warned, “Without immediate government intervention, we’re going to lose 30 to 40% of our farmers again this year.”
Rural towns have already been hollowed out. Schools have closed. Main streets are empty. Farmers talk about watching their communities fade away, one foreclosure at a time. “Every time consolidation happens, rural America dies a little bit more,” one says.
Many farmers here believe the only real way forward is returning to supply management, where price floors ensure crops don’t sell below cost. “Would that not make more sense?” one farmer asks. “Would that not kind of end the bailout program if you had a floor?”
But the big companies don’t want it. “No, because they want us beholden to them,” one farmer says.
And as long as corporate power dominates both what farmers buy and what they sell, they fear nothing will change.