Jeff Winton was on a national radio tour this spring raising awareness about US farmers’ declining mental health when he had a startling realization. As he described to a series of radio hosts from Iowa to Texas the sense of isolation and despondency increasingly affecting the agricultural workforce, he noticed with a jolt that he was describing himself.
Winton is the founder of Rural Minds, a not-for-profit group connecting Americans living outside big cities to local mental health resources. He also runs a dairy farm in New York’s Chautauqua County. He’s been overcome by worries about how President Donald Trump’s tariffs would hurt his 100-cow operation, as well as the rural peers he works with every day. “I was feeling very angry. I was feeling very depressed. I was feeling very pessimistic.
I just couldn’t believe that we were doing these things to the people that I advocate for,” Winton, 67, says. He’d spent years directing other struggling farmers into care after his 28-year-old nephew died by suicide near the family farm in 2012. So Winton decided in May to start seeing a therapist himself for the first time.
Across America’s heartland, hotlines and mental health forums focused on agricultural workers are reporting a sharp influx of calls—and bracing for more as the critical fall harvest progresses with little action or support from the industry’s supposed allies in Washington. After helping to elect Trump, US farmers felt “somebody finally was going to do right by them.” But “the exact opposite has happened,” Winton says. “People in rural America played a role in this, but now they feel betrayed.”
In many ways, growers are a diverse group, cultivating everything from commodity soybeans to grass-fed beef. But their concerns are laser-focused on one key theme: what they’re at risk of losing under the Trump administration. For one, the latest trade war has decimated demand for key US crops. This month, as American farmers begin to harvest their 80 million acres of soybeans, they’re filling up sacks and silos for domestic storage instead of loading colossal ships bound for China’s main ports, praying that they’ll find other buyers—or that Trump will strike a new trade deal with the country that’s normally the largest buyer of US soybeans by a wide margin—before the oilseeds begin to rot. Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to speak Friday as talks between the world powers press on.
On top of that, the federal safety net that’s long kept farming communities afloat during bad harvest years has deteriorated, and fresh threats to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, Medicaid and US Department of Agriculture programs risk making it worse. A spokesperson for the USDA didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
US farmers had largely expected this year would be a victory lap. The industry overwhelmingly supported Trump’s three presidential bids, with more than 3 in 4 agricultural counties backing the Republican in the latest election. Instead, the sector’s mood has sharply soured. It could even put political loyalties at risk as next year’s midterm elections approach. “Farmers tend to lean to the right and feel that Republican administrations are better suited for trade and business,” says Tim Brennan, vice president for programs and strategic impact at Farm Foundation, an Illinois-based nonprofit. “They were pretty excited about Trump coming in.” But “I don’t know that we’ve seen really any action that’s made them happy at this point.”
Farmers’ Confidence Is Down
Purdue University’s Agriculture Economy Barometer Index, which tracks farmers’ future expectations, fell in August for a third straight month. (One more month of declines will make it the longest losing streak since May 2019, during Trump’s last trade war.)
Meanwhile, small-business farm bankruptcies are the highest since 2020, and farm debt is on track to reach a high this year. A crackdown on immigrants not legally authorized to work in the US, who account for roughly 40% of crop farmworkers, is also adding pressure. A lot of farmers in recent years installed renewable energy projects like solar panels and wind turbines to supplement their income. Last month, the USDA said wind and solar projects on farmland no longer qualify for the agency’s rural development business loans.
Despite a growing sense of betrayal, Trump’s promise of long-term reward is mostly still resonating with rural voters, 53% of whom gave the president a positive approval rating in August, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Many say they expect the tariffs will strengthen the sector eventually by cracking down on foreign competition.
In some communities, there’s a general expectation that Trump will bail out farmers if they’re hurt by the trade war, something he did repeatedly during his first term. But not everyone has time to wait. It’s “painful enough that a lot of us are thinking we may not be in business to benefit from that,” says Mississippi farmer Stafford Shurden, who grows corn, rice and soybeans. He says it feels like politicians on both sides of the aisle aren’t looking out for the farming community these days. “You really feel like a profession without a party.”
Farming in the US has always been a tough career. (Just revisit the Joads, the poor family of tenant farmers driven from Oklahoma in The Grapes of Wrath.) Rural communities tend to be small and isolated, and the nature of the industry leaves it particularly exposed to financial pressures, with producers investing hefty sums upfront without knowing what prices they’ll get months later, or whether the crops will even come up. Everything from storms to diseases can destroy a harvest and leave farmers saddled with debt, with climate change now threatening to make it all worse.
The effects have compounded with each passing crisis, especially for the dwindling number of family farmers who haven’t sold out to better-funded conglomerates. Prolonged financial stress means 2025 and 2026 will be the “years of reckoning,” says Randy Roecker, until recently a dairy farmer in Wisconsin’s Sauk County, who was forced in June to sell his farm to an investor because of high debt. Roecker sold his cows two months ago and is trying to find a buyer for his milking parlor.
At Farm Foundation, sign-ups for the group’s online mental health platform have doubled this year, with about 1 in 3 users joining during the last three or so months, Brennan says. The Iowa Concern Hotline, which serves an outsize number of farmers, reports that calls in the year ended June 30 were up 27% from a year ago. More than a third of Illinois farmers surveyed last year met the criteria for at least mild anxiety disorder, while more a quarter had at least mild symptoms of depression, compared to less than 20% in the general population. The US Senate designated a Mental Health Awareness in Agriculture Day earlier this year, though the largely symbolic gesture was lost on many individual farmers struggling to stay afloat.
“I don’t know what the answer is,” Roecker says. “I’ve spoken with legislators, different organizations, and they all say, ‘We’re here to help.’ But to help do what?”
One reason calls for help among US farmers are so elevated is that awareness around mental health is up overall, with less stigma these days around asking for help. While there are more support systems now, there’s also more stress, says Josie Rudolphi, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who runs one of four USDA-funded Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Centers. Demand for the centers’ mental health programs was expected to plateau after the pandemic, but that hasn’t happened, she says.
As of mid-July, more than 600 farmers in Illinois had requested vouchers for mental health services like counseling, Rudolphi says. That’s roughly 80% of last year’s volume, with five months to go in the year.
Many of these resources are funded through federal programs or laid out in the federal Farm Bill, which covers everything from crop insurance to rural health care. The current Farm Bill is now seven years old following two congressional extensions. At the same time, the USDA has had layoffs and budget cuts. Rudolphi, who’s in the process of applying for funding to continue through 2026, says that without USDA support, “most of this programming would go away.”
There are glimmers of financial hope. About $30 billion in emergency assistance funds approved by Congress last fall to fight a downturn in the market has started to be rolled out to farmers. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act also gives farmers better access to crop insurance. In early September, more than 250 ranchers and farmers descended on Washington to meet with their representatives about needing a new Farm Bill, immediate assistance and better trade policy.
Growing discontent across American fields and orchards has created a window of opportunity for pro-farm Democrats trying to enact change. In Arkansas, Hallie Shoffner is challenging Senator Tom Cotton after losing her sixth-generation farm in February. Dairy farmer Blake Gendebien is campaigning for a House seat in a largely Republican New York district. North Carolina farmer Jamie Ager is also vying for a House seat, hoping to challenge the idea that the Democratic party has “to a large degree disconnected itself from rural America.”
Roecker, the former Wisconsin dairy farmer, says he voted for Trump in 2024, because he “thought he would help the most” and is still waiting to see how tariffs play out before making any decisions about the midterms. In the meantime, he’s struggling. The balance due on the $740,000 loan he took out to get through the pandemic has ballooned to more than $1 million because of accrued interest. (He hasn’t been able to make any payments yet, either.) He’d assumed cooling inflation and interest rates would help, but that hasn’t panned out. Struggling with what might come next, he says he’s now seeing a therapist.
Outside of agriculture, “people have jobs they change all the time. They change houses, apartments,” says Roecker, 61, who moved from rural Wisconsin to nearby Reedsburg in July and can no longer bear to drive past his old farm. “This is what farmers have, it’s this legacy. And that’s what kills us.”
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