The American Farm Bureau just released its study on the state of the U.S. farming industry in 2019. According to the Farm Bureau, things are not going well. This is a not-very-surprising turn of events. However, the rise in Chapter 12 bankruptcies is the highest our country has seen since the year after the Great Recession: According to the study, farm bankruptcies rose 20% from 2018 to 2019.
Breaking that down, the Farm Bureau says 595 family farms filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and this rise in bankruptcies has been growing for “five consecutive quarters.” Wisconsin was hit hardest with 57 of those filings in 2019, followed by Georgia.
While the Trump administration made a big deal of publicizing how much money it was throwing at farms, it turns out that giving most of that money to already-wealthy, big agricultural companies doesn’t help the smaller, family-run farms nearly as much as conservatives promised. Then again, if MAGA supporters ever took the cheap red-hat cotton out of their ears, they might have heard the Trump administration telling audiences that conservatives don’t really care about small business.
Every day there seems to be a new story about how this administration is hurting America’s farmers. Numerous articles have highlighted the deteriorating relationship between the Trump’s farming voters and the Trump administration. Hopefully, whichever candidate faces off against the Republican Party in 2020 will be buoyed by the fact that he or she could sleep for four years and still do a better job than our current Republican leadership.