Longtime readers of this column know at year’s end I pick what I believe is the top agricultural story. But 2025 is different. The top ag story isn’t singular, but rather deals with the contentious hand-to-hand fighting over numerous agricultural issues involving anyone and everyone — the White House, Congress, the Courts, state governments, and agricultural advocates of all stripes. Increasingly these policy battles have nothing to do with making life better for the public at large.

The GOP War on SNAP and the Farm Bill

It’s no secret that many hardliners in the Republican Party hate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and have looked for opportunities to reduce funding and caseload in recent years under the guise of getting rid of fraud in the system.

But a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” coalition of Congressional Agricultural Committee urban Democrats and rural Republicans kept hardliners at bay — rural members supporting SNAP for farm subsidies and urban members supporting farm subsidies for SNAP.

While in recent Farm Bill debates that same coalition began to fray, passage in July of the One Big Beautiful Bill blew the coalition to smithereens. Under that bill, Republicans managed to cripple SNAP benefits, while simultaneously increasing farm subsidies.

And now Republicans are using what remains of SNAP as a cudgel to batter Dems to do their bidding.

During the 43-day federal shutdown earlier this year, POTUS tried to withhold SNAP payments until Democrats voted to reopen the government, leading to a contentious legal battle.

Most recently, the fight is revolving around federal attempts to obtain state SNAP data of recipients, including names, birth dates, social security numbers, and immigration status.

San Francisco federal Judge Maxine Chesney sided with 21 states and the District of Columbia, issuing an injunction barring the administration from collecting the information.

The administration’s response was to escalate.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the government will withhold SNAP administrative funds to blue states until it receives the data.

It should be no surprise that the dizzying legal battle over SNAP policy will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. A different case has already reached the high court over whether the feds must pay full SNAP benefits for November.

As for the Farm Bill? The One Big Beautiful Bill extended the 2018 Farm Bill through Sept. 30, 2026.

It’s the third such extension due to the inability of the Senate and House Agricultural committees to reach consensus. I bet dollars to donuts when next fall rolls around, it will be more of the same, especially in the context of the mid-term elections.

‘Food affordability’ enters American lexicon

President Trump’s special power has been his ability to gaslight large segments of the American public into believing what former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway once described as “alternative facts.” In his second presidential campaign, POTUS told the public he was the solution for higher prices:

“We’re going to get the prices down. We have to get them down. It’s too much. Groceries, cars, everything. We’re going to get the prices down.”

And he claimed the magic would all happen quicker than you can blink your eye:

“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.”

That hasn’t happened. Not in a day. Not in a month. Not in 2025.

The latest Consumer Price Index from November shows eating at home is 1.9% higher than a year ago and eating at restaurants is up 3.7%. That’s a slight improvement from October when eating at home was reported at 2.7% higher than a year ago. But many economists believe the November figures are suspect due to the government shutdown.

Early in the year, the administration was plagued by the high price of eggs, the result of widespread bird flu outbreaks across the U.S. In response, USDA threw a bunch of policies at the wall, hoping some of them might quickly bring down retail egg prices.

Egg prices have decreased — after hitting an all-time average high of $6.23 a dozen — not because of USDA policy choices, but rather the restocking of U.S. poultry farms (which does provide an answer to the age-old question of when it comes to retail egg prices, what comes first — the chicken or the egg).

Now sky-high beef prices have the public’s attention. Driven by tight cattle supplies, farm-level cattle prices were 26.5% higher in August 2025 than the previous year. And when final numbers are published, it’s expected wholesale beef prices will have increased 12%.

In November, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed spiking beef prices on undocumented immigrants bringing sick cows into the U.S.

What?

For the most part, high beef prices haven’t slowed consumer demand. But that might be changing.

Democrats running for office in special elections this past fall have seized on the concept of “affordability” in groceries, healthcare, and energy to win elections.

Which amounts politically to chickens coming home to roost for a White House that promised to bring down grocery prices.

That hasn’t stopped POTUS from claiming affordability is a Democrat con job.

USDA has announced a number of beef policies that it claims will lower prices, but that will fare no better than its efforts on eggs — at least through 2026, which could become a major issue in the next election cycles.

In 1992, Democrat strategist James Carville once said, “It’s the economy stupid.” And I suspect the economy is one issue that the White House can’t gaslight away.

Trump’s immigration policy

The White House policy of mass deportations of illegal immigrants created a significant labor shortage of agricultural workers in 2025. Foreign workers, many undocumented, take agricultural jobs that most Americans are not willing to do, such as 12-hour shifts in extremely hot fields to pick vegetables or work in hazardous meatpacking plants cutting up animal carcasses. The work is brutal.

In recent years, roughly 40% of the U.S. agricultural labor force has been made up of undocumented immigrants.

Throughout this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted agricultural workers. Feeling political pressure from rural America and USDA Agriculture Secretary Rollins, Trump announced in June that ICE would pause raids of farms, hotels, and restaurants. But that was overturned just days later. After ICE announced the immediate resumption of raids on U.S. agriculture operations, the President announced he would establish a program to fix the issue:

“We’re working on it right now. We’re going to work it so that, some kind of a temporary pass, where people pay taxes, where the farmer can have a little control as opposed to you walk in and take everybody away.”

Nothing has come from the idea.

Already there are warning signs that ICE deportations are tearing at the economic fabric of the U.S. agriculture industry. From March to July, agricultural and related industries employment decreased by 155,000 workers or 6.5%, the majority most likely from both deportations and undocumented workers choosing not to report to work.

The Pew Research Center estimated in August that about 750,000 immigrants left the labor force over eight months.

Job losses throughout the agriculture industry can have significant economic impacts on retail prices of meat, fruit, and vegetables. In an October filing in the Federal Register, the Labor Department admitted as much:

“Without prompt action, agricultural employers will face severe labor shortages, resulting in disruption to food production, higher prices, and reduced access for U.S. consumers, particularly to fresh fruit and vegetables. Further, the Department concludes that qualified and eligible U.S. workers will not make themselves available in sufficient numbers, even at current wage levels, to fill the significant labor shortage in the agricultural sector.”

Faced with recent food inflation, especially on meat, the administration has recently fiddled with the H-2A visa program, which allows the hiring of foreign nationals for up to 10 months at a time to perform seasonal farm labor on a temporary basis.

The number of H-2A positions requested and approved has increased over the past two decades from just over 48,000 positions in 2005 to around 385,000 in 2024.

In an effort to increase those numbers further, the White House announced a new rule that lowers pay for seasonal H-2A migrant workers. But that is a bandage at best.

Many US farmers wading in red ink

Rising input costs for seeds, fuel and fertilizers, low crop prices, higher interest rates, and the impact of the White House trade war around the globe are taking a toll on the U.S. farmer. The latest ABA/Farmer Mac Agricultural Lender Survey of agricultural lenders projects that only 52% of U.S. farm borrowers will be profitable this year.

That despite USDA handing farmers the second-highest-on-record direct government payments in 2025. When the dust all clears its expected USDA will report farm program payments of $40.5 billion this year, a $30.4 billion increase from 2024.

Much of that windfall is being directed to USDA row crop farmers, who have been especially hard hit. The Federal Bank of Chicago reported at a September conference an estimated crop loss of $10 billion for soybeans, $20 billion for corn, and $8.5 billion for wheat.

To punish the White House for raising tariffs, China has turned the buying of U.S soybeans to a trickle, and it remains to be seen to what extent the Chinese will return to the U.S. market before new crop soybeans are available in Brazil early next year.

U.S. corn farmers have been plagued by record yields and depressed commodity prices. USDA’s November crop production estimated the U.S. corn crop at 16.8 billion bushels, while the National Corn Growers Association says many producers face losses of 85 cents a bushel.

The association’s survey in September showed 46% of U.S. farmers believe they are on the brink of a farm crisis.

And 2026 could be equally as bad. Ninety-three percent of respondents in the Farmer Mac Ag Lender Survey expect farm debt to increase in 2026.

Environmental Protection Agency plan to deregulate US greenhouse gas emissions

EPA has proposed rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the bedrock scientific legal foundation for federal climate regulation.

The Endangerment Finding grew out of the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA. The high court ruled that under the Clean Air Act greenhouse gas emissions “without a doubt” were air pollutants subject to regulation. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote:

“Under the clear terms of the Clean Air Act, EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do. To the extent that this constrains agency discretion to pursue other priorities of the Administrator or the President, this is the congressional design. EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory command. Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate.”

Let’s see if I got this. The EPA can’t avoid its statutory responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas by conjuring up “a laundry list” of policy concerns. And if the EPA wants to avoid regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act it must find they have no, nada, zippo impact on the climate of planet Earth.

As a result of Massachusetts v. EPA, the feds established its Endangerment Finding that six specific greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Which should have been the end of the story because only wacky climate deniers living in a different reality believe otherwise.

But now EPA is led by a widely recognized climate denier. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s proposal says the agency now believes “that GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles and engines may harm public health and welfare without having any measurable impact on the global climate change concerns identified in the Endangerment Finding.”

Zeldin further argues that Congress has not specifically authorized Congress to regulate greenhouse gases and, I can’t believe I’m typing this, that the endangerment finding:

“…did not adequately balance the projected adverse impacts attributed to global climate change with the potential benefits to the United States of increased GHG concentrations, and increased CO2 concentrations in particular. Unlike virtually every other gas regulated under the CAA, CO2 is necessary for human, animal, and plant life, and advances public health and welfare by directly impacting plant growth and therefore the price and availability of food, the success of American agricultural and related industries, and the traditional capacity of the United States to export significant food supplies around the world for economic and humanitarian purposes.”

If EPA succeeds in rescinding the Endangerment Finding, it will bind future federal administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from major U.S. sources, including transportation and agriculture while undermining efforts to control climate change.

There you have it. Food and food issues were weaponized in 2025. And not for the sake of public welfare. I wouldn’t expect 2026 to be any different, especially with the U.S., Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement up for renewal.

Discriminating readers will note there isn’t commentary over Trump’s worldwide tariff war. Reporting suggests tariffs are costing farmers. And that is true enough, at least for the moment. 

It’s still too early to tabulate how much and to what extent tariffs are hurting the U.S. agriculture community. Trump has changed tariff rates and nations seemingly as often as he changes his socks, making it near impossible to make definitive determinations. And it will be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether tariff war is constitutionally legal in the first place. 

It’s complicated and messy. But we’ll be here to cover it.

Type of work:

Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.

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