Will Farmers Lose Faith With Trump?

Global energy and fertilizer prices have skyrocketed as a result of the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, which has throttled energy production across the region and strangled flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

That’s hitting American farmers hard.

Even before the war in Iran erupted in February, the U.S. agricultural sector had been struggling under the pressures of the Trump administration’s tariffs and immigration crackdown, which strained the farm labor force. The administration also gutted the Department of Agriculture and enacted abrupt funding freezes that halted millions of dollars of grants and loans promised to farmers, fueling financial uncertainty across communities.

“It’s just a tough time,” said Christopher Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University. “Farmers were already facing very severe pressure on markets and labor, and getting supporting services, and now suddenly crucial input prices have gone through the roof,” he added. Diesel prices, for example, have soared to their highest levels since 2022.

It’s not just the U.S. sector that’s being squeezed, either. From Brazil to Pakistan, farmers everywhere—and especially those in import-dependent countries—are buckling under the pain of the Iran war. In India, the country’s fertilizer ministry has moved to double its subsidy fund to grapple with the ongoing crunch.

In the United States, Republican administrations have long been able to count on support from farmers, and it’s been no different for Trump. Even as the sector suffered under the first Trump administration’s trade war with China—ultimately prompting the U.S. leader to dole out some $28 billion—they backed his reelection campaign, helping ensure his return to office in 2025.

But frustration appears to be mounting ahead of high-stakes midterm elections this fall. A recent survey from Purdue University’s Ag Economy Barometer found that around two-thirds of respondents believed that the Iran war would have a “very negative” or “negative” impact on their farm’s net income in 2026. That’s compared to only about 13 percent of respondents who held positive views of the conflict’s impact. (About one-fifth of respondents believed that the war would have no impact on their farm’s net income.)

And a growing number of farmers seem to be losing faith in the Trump administration’s broader mission. According to the survey, the percentage of respondents who believe that the United States is headed in the “right direction” also dropped to 52 percent in May, sharply down from 74 percent in July 2025. The share of respondents who believe the country is on the “wrong track” has also surged, increasing from 26 percent in July 2025 to 48 percent this May.

That shift is “significant,” said Wesley Davis, the chief agriculture economist at Meridian Agribusiness Advisors. “The farming community is typically supportive of the Republican administrations, and so that has been surprising to see—the frustration start to emerge in the data like that.”

The Trump administration, for its part, appears to be acutely aware of how the war has been straining farmers, with Trump just last week traveling to Wisconsin for an agriculture roundtable in an effort to assuage the base.

In a rambling speech that touched on everything from transgender athletes to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in California to his renovations in Washington, Trump promised the assembled farmers “good things” over the next 90 days and hinted at more relief.

In addition to the some $28 billion that Trump’s White House shelled out to farmers in his first administration to cushion the blow of his trade war, he unveiled another $12 billion bailout in December. “We’re looking at that right now, about increasing it,” he said in Wisconsin.

“What happened to you is artificial, with the energy and with the fertilizer,” he said at another point, referring to the impacts of the Iran war. “So we’re looking at something.”

Some of the damage might be hard to reverse. Even after the massive bailout from the first Trump administration, U.S. soybean farmers lost considerable market share in the aftermath of the trade war that they still have not recovered. Barrett, the Cornell University economist, said that the Trump administration’s purported assistance likely pales in comparison to the farmers’ economic toll.

“Most of these are problems that originate from decisions made by the administration, so there’s been relatively little assistance,” he said. “There are these payments that ostensibly are coming, but those are rather small compared to the likely aggregate losses.”

Fertilizer prices in the United States have eased—at least for now. Prices recently dropped to pre-Iran war levels, driven in part by a slowdown in purchasing and the rerouting of supplies in the wake of the war, according to Davis. The timing of many U.S. purchases, with many farmers having already bought the bulk of their fertilizer for this year’s planting season, is also a factor.

“Having all this occur after a lot of those purchases were made, you know, last fall and early part of this year, I think, really helps us—although the margins for farmers are terrible,” said Joseph Glauber, a former chief economist at the Department of Agriculture who is now at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

For those farmers who did not prebuy their fertilizer and have faced higher prices, some may have had to go into debt to purchase fertilizers, or switch their crops to less fertilizer-intensive options, said Ellen Wald, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center.

And as farmers gear up for the next round of fertilizer purchases this fall, uncertainty looms. There is a “real open question around what happens with prices,” Davis said. “There is so much uncertainty around what the path of the conflict could be and when those plants might come back online and how exporters will behave over the next two to four quarters,” he said.