Last summer, on one of our many 625-mile drives between our home in Kansas City and our farm in Fennville, I marveled at the beautiful farmland on both sides of the expressways.

Vast green fields of corn, soybeans and wheat stretching as far as the eye could see.

Having grown up on a small fruit farm in Michigan, I couldn’t help but feel proud of American agriculture and grateful for living in a land of plenty.

Sure, food prices at the grocery store are higher than we’d like, but that’s not the farmer’s fault. Blame the “middleman,” corporate conglomerates, excessive packaging/marketing, bird flu, you name it. The list is endless.

But the other thing I couldn’t help but marvel at were all the Trump signs.

Of course, 2024 was an election year. What really struck me, though, was that it seemed just about every farmer between Missouri and Michigan wanted Donald Trump back in the White House.

And I couldn’t help but wonder — why?

Now, the chickens are coming home to roost. As my hard-working farm mother often warned me, be careful what you wish for.

As we all know, Trump started freezing federal funding — including the billions doled out by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) — within days of taking office.

Caught in the meat grinder is billions of dollars in federal aid to farmers in the form of conservation and energy assistance programs and ag research aimed at fighting such diseases as soybean rust, which can wipe out entire fields.

Just ending the former USAID’s Food Aid for Peace Program alone will cost American farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost income, fueling economic uncertainty in rural communities nationwide.

Rather than a thoughtful, meticulous approach to rooting out waste, fraud, or ineffective programs, Trump and Elon Musk are taking a meat cleaver to government spending.

Farmers are getting butchered in the process, and some are blaming the baloney they bought on the campaign trail.

“A lot of rural people, over 70 percent of rural farmers and ranchers, only believe the Fox News and the talk radio,” observed Will Westmoreland, a southwest Missouri farmer in a TikTok video.

Those “news sources,” along with Trump, naturally denied that the new Administration would implement the infamous Project 2025 initiatives. But that’s exactly what they have been doing since day one.

“The worst thing that they did to us in rural America is that they convinced us somehow to place the culture wars over our own wellbeing,” Westmoreland added.

If the funding cuts and freezes aren’t reversed, some worry they could lose their farms. Meanwhile, the threats of tariffs and the unknown impact they could have on agricultural markets still loom.

Farmers are no strangers to uncertainty. The weather. Commodity prices. Interest rates.

Add the shifting sands of a Trump presidency, where he says one thing one day and does another the next, and many farmers might want to consider relocating to Canada or Mexico, where governments are more stable.

Who knows what Trump will think of next? Maybe he’ll nationalize all the farmland in America. Or relocate all the Palestinians to the Kansas prairie so he can build luxury hotels and casinos in Gaza.

How to submit an opinion

Ottawa News Network accepts columns and letters to the editor. Letters should be about 300 words and columns should not exceed 1,000 words. ONN reserves the right to fact-check submissions as well as edit for length, clarity and grammar. Please send submissions to newsroom@ottawanewsnetwork.org.

Trump is full of … ideas.

So, as I drive across the Midwest and still see those Trump signs lining the highways, I wonder how long before some farmers start tearing them down?

And I still can’t understand why people who work the land would ever trust a city slicker real estate billionaire who never worked a day in his life or ever got his hands dirty — unless it was committing a felony or two, or even 34?

As my mother told me — often after working a 12-hour day — fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice…

— Bill Dalton is a former reporter and editor for The Kansas City Star. He spends summers on the family farm near Fennville.