I did everything they told us to do. I voted for the guy who said he was coming for the forgotten farmer. Turns out he was coming for the small farmer’s wallet and handing the receipt to corporate ag.
Lawrencia Rogers, 33, planted a rosebush at age six. She got into a USDA-funded fellowship to learn to farm on an eighth of an acre in Iowa. Two and a half weeks in, Trump and his USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins yanked the $2.5 million grant because it helped ‘underserved producers’ — which in their broken vocabulary means Black, immigrant, veteran, or just plain new farmers who don’t come from a trust fund. They called it ‘wasteful spending’ and ‘DEI.’
Meanwhile, commodity programs pour endless cash to the handful of corporations that already own the food system. Eighteen Iowa farms went bankrupt in 2025 — a 220% jump in one year, per the American Farm Bureau Federation. Trump’s tariffs cratered soybean sales to China. His war with Iran jacked up diesel and fertilizer costs. USDA lost 20,000 employees. The Local Food for Schools program — which bought food from local farmers for school lunches and food banks — gone. Minority farmer support, gone. A functionless $1 billion specialty crop program the local USDA office didn’t even know existed.
Trump told farmers he was their champion. He fucking lied. A federal judge ordered $127 million in grants reinstated, but the fellowship Rogers was counting on was already mothballed. The corporate leash-wearers at USDA don’t answer the phone.
This is what ‘drain the swamp’ looks like when you drain the family farm and hand the swamp water to the donor class. The Trump-Rollins Republican Party is taking a shit on every small farmer in Iowa and calling it fiscal discipline. They promised rural America a champion and delivered a vulture.
Rogers has her plot until December. The program is gone. The instruction is gone. The promise is gone. Take the flag pin off before you rob the goddamn family farm, you screaming eagleshit hypocrites.
Source story: the source story.