National Agriculture Day is a good day to reflect upon the necessity of American agriculture — and upon the ethic, values, and endurance of the Americans who work within it. These Americans are unique in our national life: every American is important, but it is the Americans who work on agriculture who are important to all Americans. Very few of us work in professions or pursuits that touch the lives of every American, every day — but our farmers do.
This is important to understand, because it illuminates the crisis at hand in the material suffering of American farmers now. There’s no question that the crisis is real. Not even two months into the new administration of President Donald J. Trump, we are still grappling with the magnitude of an American ag crisis four years in the making.
Sky-high interest rates, coupled with rock-bottom commodity prices, paired with absurd overregulation, married to sector-specific artificial scarcities, have sent our farmers on a rollercoaster ride that makes it impossible to plan, impossible to invest, and impossible to pay the bills. The effects are felt not just in the lives and livelihoods of farmers, but in the grocery bills and dinner tables of every American household.
So, on this National Agriculture Day 2025, I have a message direct from President Donald J. Trump: help is here. To meet the crisis in American agriculture, we are disbursing the funds — which will aggregate to more than ten billion dollars — from the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program. Details are being released Tuesday, and applications are going in the mail this week, before the deadline mandated by Congress. Our farmers will get the help they’re owed sooner, not later.
Swiftly getting this critical aid out to our farm families is a top priority for President Trump’s United State Department of Agriculture. Our department, after years of ideological projects and programmatic meandering that responded to fads in Washington rather than American farmers’ needs and priorities, is once again focused on its singular mission: helping the hard-working Americans who feed, fuel, and clothe not just America, but the world.
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The Emergency Commodity Assistance Program is a beginning, not an end, of our aid to farmers in crisis. USDA will soon unveil a new disaster program, totaling nearly $21 billion, to help our farm and ranch families recover from natural disasters in 2023 and 2024.
From hurricanes to chronic drought, and every disaster in between, we will get help to our producers in a fast and effective way, based solely on indemnifying losses suffered – and undistracted by the Biden administration’s failed DEI policies that hamstrung and ultimately halted the 2022 disaster program, leaving one-third of aid still tied up in Washington while producers suffered.
Of course, the ultimate help to our farmers is to end the causes of the crisis in American agriculture altogether, and President Trump is focused upon doing exactly that. New fair-trade deals that guarantee market access for our agricultural products will increase prosperity. So too will the eradication of anti-ag policies like the electric-vehicle mandate, pervasive DEI rules and practices, and the Waters of the U.S. rule. Expansion of tax relief will also make farming simpler, easier, and more productive — with results seen in the lives of producers and consumers alike.
Last but certainly not least, President Trump will demand that the Congress strengthen the safety net for our farmers and ranchers under a new farm bill, so producers have the tools they need to — to borrow a phrase — Make America Great Again.
On this National Agriculture Day 2025 we remember that American agriculture is the foundation of America itself. We see its crisis and we know it is a crisis for all America. Having seen it, we’re meeting its challenge head on.
Our president expects no less — and our farmers deserve no less. Hardly a month from now, we’ll celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of a revolution for liberty begun by farmers. They defended us then, and they sustain us know. As an administration, as a Department, and as a country — we’ll fight for them as they have for us.
Brooke Rollins is the 33rd secretary of agriculture.