If there was ever a golden age of farming, it was the early 20th century, when rural life anchored the nation. More than half of Americans lived outside cities, and nearly half the workforce farmed — growing diverse crops by hand and earning a living directly from the soil.
Those days are gone.
Today, the U.S. loses an average of 63 farms each day. That’s more than 23,000 each year since 2017. That means that between 2017 and 2024, 162,000 farms — nearly 13% of the national total — went out of business. It’s a loss of nearly 24 million acres, an area larger than Maine.
Most of these farms that are going out of business in the U.S. are family-owned, small farms — with an annual gross income below $350,000. Large farms that gross over $1 million are continuing to expand, producing nearly half of the country’s total domestic food output while accounting for less than 4% of total farming operations in the country.
The U.S. has lost more than 23,000 farms each year since 2017.
The numbers don’t paint a bucolic picture. While median farm household income exceeded the national average, over half of small farms are running on profit margins below 10 percent. For new farmers, startup and operating costs now require millions in upfront capital. Making ends meet is nearly impossible for most, and the few who do make a profit are almost always large commercial operations.
Caught between consolidation, trade wars, rural flight and record production costs of nearly $482 billion in 2023, the majority of American family farms are teetering on collapse. For generations, the government has tried to save them with bailouts. So far, it hasn’t slowed the number of family farms going out of business year over year.
Since 1933, subsidies and crop insurance have pumped an inflation-adjusted average of $17.6 billion annually into farm income. But those dollars now flow mostly to the largest operations — those with the most acreage and commodity crops like corn and soybeans — allowing them to expand by buying up land from neighboring small farms. In 2022, around half of the farms that participated in the federal crop insurance program were small family farms. Despite that, they received just 12% of the payouts. Large and medium farms, which accounted for 42% of participants, collected 80% of the funds.
Government payouts don’t provide as much relief to small farmers as they do commercial operations, and short-term bailouts paid by the federal government have been widely criticized for weak oversight and uneven distribution.
An analysis of early Coronavirus Food Assistance Program payments — totaling $5.6 billion — found the top 1% of recipients received more than 20% of the funds, while the bottom 10 percent got just 0.26%. Despite a $250,000 cap on payments, large operations often bypassed limits through eligibility loopholes. Titan Swine, a conglomerate of Iowa hog producers, claimed over $2.5 million. Small, family farms didn’t receive as much help.
How many more decades of loss can American agriculture endure?
Jonathan Coppess, former administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency and professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, uses this kind of example to stress how “bailouts” for farmers are the very thing that can drive midsize and small family farms out of business.
Last December, the Trump administration announced another $12 billion in one-time “bridge payments” for farmers that produce row crops like soybeans and corn ahead of expected funding later this year under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Farmers and lawmakers across party lines dismissed it as a “Band-Aid” that ignored structural problems.
“How many bridge payments can there be?” Coppess says. “I don’t think we’re learning the right lessons here, and we’re certainly not learning the right lessons from history because we’ve seen these problems before.”
The United States was built on the ideal of the American farmer: self-reliant, hard-working, abundant. But the reality is a hundred years of hard times. The number of American farms peaked at 6.8 million in 1935, then fell sharply midcentury. Since the 1970s, they’ve continued to steadily decrease.
If decades of policy and payouts were meant to save American farmers, then why are we still losing them so dramatically?
In 1932, months before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, Farmers Union president John Simpson issued a warning. “My candid opinion is that unless you call a special session of Congress … and start a revolution in government affairs, there will be one started in the country,” Simpson wrote the president-elect in a letter. Dust Bowl droughts, Depression-era debt and collapsing markets had pushed farmers to the brink.
Roosevelt responded by signing the New Deal’s 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, paying farmers to cut acreage and stabilize prices — putting millions of acres out of use to revive demand. After the Supreme Court struck down parts of the law for creating artificial scarcity, Congress passed a revised version in 1938, financed through federal revenues and laying the foundation for the modern Farm Bill. The USDA’s Farm Security Administration — precursor to today’s Farm Service Agency — began offering land-purchase loans, resettlement housing and health care, raising participating farm families’ net worth by 21% in its first year.
These safety nets were unprecedented. But the farmer’s role as a political figure — both celebrated and defiant — long predated them. George Washington released a militia against farmers protesting grain taxes during the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson called farmers America’s “most valuable citizens.” By the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead Act of 1862 — granting land to aspiring farmers — and the creation of the USDA formalized support, even as populist movements rose in protest of falling crop prices and land speculation. Even 164 years ago, farmers needed help to get started and to get by.
“Already in the 18th century, there’s this ideal of the self-sufficient American farmer that just wasn’t true,” says Peter Simons, an environmental historian at Hamilton College in New York. This “tension,” as he puts it, is always going to be there. It’s why farmers were catapulted into powerful political symbols early on — the tension is “so unsatisfying,” he says, because those whose work it is to feed the country and who serve as a symbol of its bounty have always struggled, and the American government has struggled to support them.
That struggle hasn’t always been evident, politically or otherwise. Under the 1941 Lend-Lease Act during World War II, farmers ramped up production to feed Allied nations, even as many were drafted. Within three years, output rose 16%. After the war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Food for Peace program exported surpluses abroad, turning agriculture into a tool of Cold War soft power.
“Most of the world is devastated because of World War II, and American farmers step in to fill this void,” Simons says. “They perceive that they’re holding communism at bay in the rest of the world.”
But at home, the costs mounted. Between 1940 and 1980, the farm population dropped from about one-quarter of Americans to less than 3%, while the average farm size more than doubled. The Green Revolution, urban sprawl and USDA pressure to “get big or get out,” as Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz famously put it, accelerated consolidation. When the U.S. sold massive portions of subsidized wheat to the Soviet Union in 1972, farmers took on heavy debt.
By the 1980s, high interest rates and embargoes triggered another farm crisis. Over the decade, more than 250,000 farms went out of business, and hundreds of thousands defaulted on loans. In 1985, the U.S. saw its highest number of bank failures since the Great Depression, in large part because farmers simply couldn’t make it.
That year’s farm bill, the most expensive in history at that time, aimed to stabilize the sector while initiating a deeper restructuring of federal support. Price supports were lowered to match global markets and loan deficiency programs introduced direct payments when prices fell below targets. A decade later, the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act completed the shift — eliminating remaining price supports, ending acreage limits and mandating crop insurance to receive subsidies — leaving small and midsize farms newly exposed to global market swings.
The United States was built on the ideal of the American farmer: self-reliant, hard-working, abundant. But the reality is a hundred years of hard times.
Ryan Dennis, author of “Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm,” grew up on his family’s dairy farm in upstate New York as those changes took hold. Deregulation gutted milk price supports — briefly restored in 2002, then ended again in 2012. Between 2003 and 2019, the U.S. lost over half of its dairy farms. His family sold theirs in 2008.
“To me, the big issue is that (farmers) felt unseen and unheard for so long, and that’s had consequences,” Dennis says.
A 2016 Journal of Rural Studies analysis found farmers’ trust in government plummeted after 1968. Between 2002 and 2008, not a single surveyed farmer said they trusted the federal government “just about always.”
“Farmers have a really long memory,” says Pam Lewison, a fourth-generation farmer and agricultural policy research director at the Washington Policy Center. “If you continually get bit over and over and over again, eventually that loyalty erodes and it turns into something different.”
Once a volatile voting bloc swayed by commodity prices, farmers are now a smaller share of the electorate, folded into broader rural politics. In the 444 farming-dependent counties designated by the USDA, about three-quarters of voters supported President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and again in 2024. His promises to revive rural America resonated, but his trade policies during both terms destabilized markets, triggered billions in federal aid and left many farmers uncertain where their loyalties lie.
“He doesn’t seem or act like a person who is going to help someone from a farm,” Dennis says. “But because he promised to disrupt the system, that was attractive to farmers. In my opinion, it did nothing but hurt them.”
With most agricultural lobbying now driven by agribusiness, the gap between policy and farmers’ needs has only widened. Lewison argues the problem is more about perception than partisanship. Farmers are often reduced to caricatures — either faceless conglomerates or nostalgic pastoral figures.
“There are all kinds of farmers, and there are all kinds of people on farms,” Lewison says. She believes there’s a disconnect between who farmers are and the picture that government policy has painted of them; that “farmers aren’t people who are aware of the things that happen to them politically (and) the broader world around them.”
When a family business is running on razor-thin margins, all it takes to shut down the operation is a little bit of bad luck. A disease like bird flu or brucellosis infects a herd. Drought wipes out a crop. A combine breaks down.
That’s why when grain farmer and former Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, entered Congress in 2007, he bought duplicate versions of nearly every piece of equipment to keep his farm running while he was in Washington. In recent years, modern farm machinery has become so digitally dependent that a single malfunction can mean days of waiting for a technician, and thousands in losses. A 2023 U.S. PIRG Education Fund report estimated that farmers lose $3 billion annually to tractor downtime and another $1.2 billion in excess repair costs.
Tester’s Agricultural Right to Repair Act, introduced in the Senate in 2022, requires manufacturers to provide farmers access to diagnostic tools and software. Dozens of states have proposed similar laws, but only Colorado has passed one that covers farm equipment.
“The good lord played a trick on me,” Tester says, recalling a tractor failure shortly after introducing the bill — and the $800 repair that amounted to resetting a computer code. “It’s amazing to me that you can buy a tractor with a computer and not own the computer.”
Farmers have a really long memory. If you continually get bit over and over and over again, eventually that loyalty erodes, and it turns into something different.
Equipment costs are just one pressure farmers can’t control these days. In the first half of 2025, the U.S. posted a record $28.6 billion agricultural trade deficit. Soybean prices sank under Chinese tariffs, with farmers shouldering an estimated market loss of $89 per planted acre. Cattle ranchers faced their own strain after record prices, spurred by restrictions on imported beef from Brazil, fell steeply as Trump opened the U.S. market to increased imports from Argentina. Shawn Arita, a former USDA economist, estimates losses of $35 billion to $44 billion across nine major commodities in 2025.
As so many farms shut down, the land and resources they leave behind are reshaping America’s role in the global food system. Foreign ownership of U.S. farmland has risen 67% in less than 10 years. The termination of USAID in mid-2025 threatens not only future farm income, but also international agricultural research — millions once funneled through U.S. universities into disease management, crop resilience and climate adaptation. Food insecurity in farming-dependent counties rose nearly 12% between 2013 and 2023, though the USDA has since stopped tracking much of that data. Budget cuts also wiped out roughly $1 billion in local food programs connecting farms to schools and food banks.
“If the purpose is to generate commodity exchanges, then this is a terrific system,” says Andrew Flachs, an anthropology professor at Purdue University. “But if the purpose is to feed hungry people and sustain rural communities in place, then we need to think of a better system.”
No one knows when the next bailout will arrive, what the new Farm Bill — up for renewal in September — will deliver or how many more farms will disappear before then. Farming has always been a gamble shaped by weather, markets and politics. But today, the odds are stacked almost entirely against those still playing.
“If things don’t change, it’s hard to figure out how things are going to pencil out moving forward,” Tester says. “I watched my neighbors leave en masse in the 1980s, and I’m watching my neighbors leave now, too.”
How many more decades of loss can American agriculture endure? At the current pace — more than 23,000 farms lost each year — within three generations, the nation’s remaining 1.6 million small and midsize family farms could all be gone.
This story appears in the March 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.