We are about to ruin what makes America great — and it will hurt these Trump voters first

“We’re in a hell of a mess here,” said Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs as he worked on his combine at the start of harvest season.

“A severe cash flow mess,” he sighed. “A working capital mess.”

Gibbs, who farms more than 500 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa hay in Shelby County, along with a 90-head cow-calf operation, described the five-alarm fire raging in the farming community from Trump’s blanket tariffs.

Some growers have called the fallout from his chaotic trade war, and the reciprocal tariffs it provoked, a “farmageddon” that could ruin what made rural America great.

It’s that bad.

The Trump tariffs are shrinking incomes and exploding expenses for farmers, who, thanks to a president they still overwhelmingly support, fear losing their farms.

Many don’t know how much longer they can hang on.

Trump’s punitive tariffs on foreign buyers made their crops less competitive in markets around the world (and drove down prices more) while other senseless tariffs on fertilizer, steel, aluminum, and lumber just sent the cost of doing business through the roof.

The double whammy of Trump tariffs is especially painful for family farms that make up about 87 percent of all farms in Ohio.

Individual farmers struggle to break even, buy supplies, sell their crops, and build a sustainable future with long-term customers.

But the current tariff dance with Trump keeps them up nights.

Everything a farmer buys “from phosphate and potash to agricultural chemicals, herbicides, machine parts, is up by 50 percent over the last decade, while our proceeds from the sale of crops is down by 40 percent,” said fifth-generation Ohio farmer Joe Logan.

The former president of the Ohio Farmers union — a group focused on family farmers — maintained “the industrial agricultural community is chugging right along, raking in billions of dollars” while family farmers are not making any money.

Instead, they’re battling irrational tariffs, rising costs, high interest rates, farm bankruptcies and abiding dread.

How will they move crops without buyers or the major trade deals Trump promised to fix what he broke?

Farmers felt the same creeping despair with the tariff debacle of 2018 when Trump first slapped punitive tariffs on crucial exporters of American crops, including China.

The move caused a tidal wave of financial disaster for U.S. farms and irreparably damaged trade relations abroad.

“Farmers, agribusiness and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had invested millions of dollars and decades of time to cultivate foreign markets like those in China,” explained Logan, “which, up until that point, bought most of our soybeans.”

But the biggest crop farmed in Ohio was fated to lose its biggest customer then and now.

In 2018, Trump destroyed enduring trade deals in overseas markets and “the trust that we had built over the previous 30 years,” Gibbs said.

“That left us with acute losses because of retaliatory tariffs, primarily from China.”

The U.S. soybean crop dropped 20% in value overnight in the summer of 2018, recalled the farmer from west central Ohio.

“I came out swinging pretty hard with that and was very critical of the president and the policy at the time.”

The tariff madness was enough for Gibbs, a lifelong Republican and former chairman of the Shelby County GOP, to leave his party in 2019 and join forces with state Democrats as an advocate for rural Ohio and America.

Then came 2025 and another blast of Trump tariffs to hammer farmers with shattered export markets and rising input costs.

“This is déjà vu all over again,” Gibbs griped. “We’re back in the same situation but only worse. In the major commodities, corn, wheat, soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, prices are below the cost of production, so there’s built-in loss. But we also have exorbitant costs that never recovered since Covid.”

Plus, the front-end cost of farming has been jacked up by Trump tariffs on seed, fertilizer, and machinery.

Farmers in already-thin margins are getting crushed.

Tariffs on imported goods have made it more expensive for them to farm while retaliatory tariffs, imposed by other countries, (in response to Trump’s trade war) mean fewer American crops being sold and, when they are, at lower prices.

It’s a no-win gambit for farmers and the ag industry that generates over $9 trillion in economic activity and supports millions of jobs.

Last year, China accounted for 54 percent of U.S. soybean exports. This year it bought zero so far.

Not a single soybean from U.S. farmers.

Chinese buyers turned to Brazil and other suppliers for the crop in 2018. U.S. soybean trade with China never fully recovered.

“We did hear that China made a big purchase recently,” said Logan, “but unfortunately that purchase was from Argentina rather than the U.S., so we’re in a world of hurt.”

He believes more farmers are waking up to the hollowness of Trump’s promises for a “golden age” through tariffs but expect the government to bail them out again like it did in 2018.

Trump floated using tariff revenue as farm subsidies.

Farmers will wait, because what choice do they have? And sweat.

“I used to tell my son, when he was just getting started, until you wake up in the middle of the night, 2:30 in the morning, and you got sweat rolling down your face, you haven’t really experienced what it is to farm,” Gibbs said with a rueful laugh.

“I’m feeling that now, 49 years in. It’s hard.”

• Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.