Chase A.
An enormous man in a suit threatens to step on a red barn with 'Take America Back' written on it.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs, trade wars and immigration crackdown are taking a toll on Wisconsin farmers. For almost six months, China refused to purchase U.S. soybeans in response to Trump’s escalating tariffs, leaving Wisconsin farmers with no customer for their bumper soybean crop this year. Commodity prices are low, due to high yields and depressed demand. And recently after a long period of quiet, federal immigration agents arrived in Wisconsin, targeting construction workers in Madison and farm hands in Manitowoc — bad news for Wisconsin’s dairy industry, where 60-90% of the workforce is comprised of undocumented immigrants.
It’s an anxious, uncertain time in rural areas of the state.
Yet on a recent drive from Madison to Reedsburg, I passed dozens of giant Trump signs planted among the corn and soybean fields and banners declaring “Take America Back!” on the sides of red barns.
How long will Wisconsin farmers continue to believe this administration is on their side?
National polls show rural support for the president remains strong, even as farmers say their own economic situation is weakening. Many hope the short-term pain of Trump’s tariffs will pay off in the long term, with a stronger and more stable U.S. economy. Ever since he first ran for president in 2016, Trump appealed to many farmers with his pitch that he would remember “the forgotten men and women of America” and, especially, with his criticism of global trade deals like NAFTA, which accelerated the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture that helped kill off more than half of family farms in our state since the early 2000s.
Year after year, Wisconsin was the No. 1 state for farm bankruptcies in the country, as the number of dairies dropped from 16,000 in 2004 to fewer than 7,000 today. Since 2023, we no longer lead the country in bankruptcies — consolidation and foreclosure have simply weeded out so many farms that there aren’t that many left to shut down.
When things have been as bad as they have been for as long as they have, it’s not surprising that Trump’s brash, anti-establishment message resonated with rural voters. Many hoped that he would throw a rock at the whole system and shake up what felt like an impossibly rigged economy. Alas, it turns out it’s possible for things to go from bad to even worse.
Recently, Trump promised to use some of the revenue generated by his chaotic tariffs on other countries’ products to make bailout payments to farmers, although the status of those payments is up in the air during the government shutdown. Even without the shutdown, converting tariff revenue into subsidies for U.S. farmers is “not even like robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s like robbing Peter to pay Peter,” Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former senior adviser for rural development at USDA, told me. Tariffs are essentially a tax on domestic consumers, who have been paying much higher prices for goods like farm equipment and fertilizer. Taking that money and giving it back in the form of a handout to the same farmers who paid for the tariffs in the first place is no real solution.
Plus, getting another bailout “isn’t what farmers want. We want to receive our money from the marketplace and let that process work out,” Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, told the Green Bay Fox affiliate WLUK-TV.
Von Ruden recently hosted a listening session on his farm in Westby, part of a multistate tour by Farmers for Free Trade to dramatize the harm done by tariffs. The group hopes to pressure members of Congress to recognize the problem and vote to change course. But so far Republican members of Congress in Wisconsin seem determined to show how loyal they are to Trump, even if that means a whole lot of pain for their constituents.
Beyond the next bailout for farmers, whenever that might come, unstable markets caused by trade wars are a long-term problem. Soybean farmers say it will take years to regain a good trading relationship with China. And there is no thoughtful government effort underway to support smaller, local and regional food economies. Meanwhile the looming loss of health care and food assistance under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” also threatens lasting damage to rural Wisconsin.
And then there are the ICE raids. For decades, Wisconsin dairy farms have depended on an immigrant workforce that does not qualify for any form of work visa under current rules, since the U.S. government only offers visas for seasonal, not year-round farm work. More than half of the workers on Wisconsin dairy farms are undocumented immigrants. Until recently, many Wisconsin dairy farmers and their workers hoped to remain under the radar, even as immigration raids have caused chaos in other states. Across the country this year, half of farmers report contending with a serious labor shortage, according to Zach Rutledge, an ag researcher at Michigan State University.
Wisconsin dairy farmers skated through the first Trump administration without any dairy farm raids. This year, high-profile ICE crackdowns in Chicago and Los Angeles seemed far away and farmers could kid themselves that Trump was only trying to round up “bad” immigrants, not the hardworking people they employ. But then came the arrests in Manitowoc, a big dairy producing area of the state, and the startling roundup of seven construction workers who shared a house in Madison.
In late October, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited the Twin Cities and defended a raid that snatched a group of roofers off a work site in St. Paul.
The cruelty, the waste, the lack of any coherent plan by this administration is becoming clearer and clearer.
According to one dairy farmer I know, farmers have received mixed signals from the Trump administration, with the ag and labor secretaries assuring them they understand the importance of the immigrant workforce, while Stephen Miller continues to press for mass deportations, consequences be damned.
Trump, busy building his massive White House ballroom, remains distracted, unpredictable, unconcerned about the chaos he has unleashed. Sooner or later, even his core constituency, the people who put food on our tables and who are accustomed to enduring economic uncertainty and hardship year after year, are bound to get fed up.
Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner and author of Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers.
