Does Josh Hawley’s farm bill really help farmers?
- Mandy Noble
- Nov 21, 2025
- 4 min read
Josh Hawley recently introduced a bill to Congress titled “Support Our Farmers and Ranchers Act of 2025” that caught my attention. As I have mentioned before, I come from a farming family—my great-grandparents and grandparents made their living on a 360-acre pig and cattle farm, and my dad still maintains a small hobby farm on 40 acres. While I love animals, my passions lie in growing food; my grandmother used to grow an acre garden every year and canned food for all of us. Because of this, I would like to go into agriculture on the produce side of things, but at the rate things are going, I’m not sure if this dream of mine will ever come to fruition.
Farmers are currently facing a crisis across the board. Most people know about the foreign beef purchase as part of the $40 billion bailout package we are sending to Argentina, but this is nowhere near the first time there have been problems this year. Soybean producers are hurting due to Trump’s tariff war, and are projected to lose an estimated $10 billion dollars due to losses of sales to China, among other things. Earlier in the season, cherry farmers in San Joaquin County, California are estimated to have lost more than $100 million, due in part to worker shortages, and one Oregon cherry farmer is reported to have lost $250,000-$300,000 in crops that rotted on the trees due to I.C.E. raids scaring away workers.
Needless to say, Hawley’s bill caught my attention. There’s two key parts that are important to notice. This is the synopsis of the bill:
“Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall provide 1-time payments to eligible agricultural producers for necessary expenses related to losses of revenue and quality or production losses of covered commodities, specialty crops, livestock, or poultry."
The first problem I see is that there is no amount discussed. Generally speaking, you would expect to see a payout amount based on something, like a percentage of loss, with a cap out payment. So how much do they plan to help? Is everyone going to get a one-time payment of a specific amount, regardless of actual losses? This lack of detail seems like something that should have been mentioned.
The second important part is the part where he discusses how to fund the bill. Here is the text to that:
“There is authorized to be appropriated, and there is appropriated, out of any qualifying tariff proceeds in the Treasury that are not otherwise appropriated, $20,000,000,000 for fiscal year 2026 for the Secretary to provide payments under this section, to remain available until expended.”
At least here there is a number given, but when you look at the losses above, half of it would immediately go to soybean producers; corn is expected to lose $20 billion and wheat is projected to lose $8.5 billion, according to InvestigateMidwest. That’s $38.5 billion in just three crops, and we haven’t considered cattle farmers yet. But there is one more important piece to this puzzle: the tariff revenue itself.
As of now, tariff revenues are projected to have made $195 billion—$117 billion of which comes from the higher tariffs Trump has enacted. So far, the numbers seem feasible: $195 billion is more than enough to cover bailing out the farmers and then some, but there’s one really big, glaring problem.
Right now, the tariffs are facing legal battles over Trump having enacted them without the approval of Congress. You see, now we fall into “taxation without representation” waters, because the politicians we voted into office are supposed to be the ones that decide if we are taxed, not the President. It is very, very likely that Trump’s tariffs are going to be ruled illegal and he’ll be ordered to reverse them. I don’t think we will see any of it come back to our pockets; quite frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to funnel it into a pet project under the guise of charity, but either way, the farmers who need help won’t be seeing a penny from the tariffs, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to see that fact.
So what does this mean for Hawley? Well, we know it won’t go anywhere because the way he chose to fund it is incapable of working. On the surface, it looks like he cares about farmers and is using common sense legislation to help them when they need it. However, when you realize the math doesn’t math, it becomes a bit different.
Hawley is an intelligent man, one look at his academic history will tell you that. I think he knows this bill will not move forward, and I think he is going to use it as a ruse to seem helpful to the farmers of rural Missouri while not actually accomplishing a damned thing for them. I’ve had enough of politicians pretending they care for farmers—we need someone who can accomplish things in Congress, not just spout pretty words and ideas and pretend they’re really trying, while making backroom deals that hurt us just to keep their handlers happy.
At a time when Missourians need strong fiscal leadership, this is not the effort I expect to see. I want to see legislation that is well researched and has a strong chance of actually being passed instead of weak promises with no way to actually fulfill them. Hawley is performative; he is not as accomplished as I would expect one to be at this point in his career, and with his current actions, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
We need/deserve better for Missouri.
MJ
If you’d like to see the full bill, or the articles I used to research crop losses, these are the links:
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