Republican lawmakers have heard farmers’ concerns about President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. Their response? Short-term pain, long-term gain.
Farmers faced a shrunken export market and operating costs after Trump enforced steep tariffs on key trading partners and farm materials last year. In response, the Trump administration will begin disbursing a $12 billion bailout to farmers due to “unfair market disruptions” at the end of this month.
Republican lawmakers from Wisconsin, a major agricultural producer, acknowledge the 2025 to 2026 crop season challenges, which resulted in an estimated $34.6 billion in losses for the industry, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. But they’re arguing that the success of specialty crops and rosier-than-expected economic indicators are evidence farmers can withstand any turmoil the tariffs have caused.
“Our farmers understand that we have to level the playing field. And how do you do that? You do that with these tariffs,” U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden said. “In order to get to the long term, you have to get through the short term, and that’s the reason that this money’s going back to people in the agriculture industry.”
A bipartisan group of agricultural experts said the Trump administration’s policies have “significantly damaged” the American farm economy in a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee leadership this month, as first reported by The New York Times.
“It is clear that the current Administration’s actions, along with Congressional inaction, have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical ag research and staffing,” they wrote.
Wisconsin agriculture experts told NOTUS the administration’s bailout is undesirable and insufficient to cover many farmers’ lost revenue this year.
“They don’t solve the long-run problem of higher input costs and low prices; they are a Band-Aid to get us through this short-term problem,” said Paul Mitchell, the director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Agriculture professor and economist Steven Deller, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a similar view.
“We’re hemorrhaging thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, and they’re giving us pennies,” Deller said, adding that farmers want “fair markets” and a “level playing field.”
Republicans in the state, however, are standing behind the president’s agenda, pointing to the administration’s stated goal to boost the manufacturing industry through baseline tariff rates for all countries, reciprocal tariffs and tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico.
“Wisconsin, at the end of the day, is going to benefit as we bring manufacturing back to the state,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the likely GOP nominee for governor.
He blamed the North American Free Trade Agreement for sending manufacturing companies packing for cheaper operations in China. Trump replaced NAFTA during his first term in office with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — a deal Tiffany applauded.
Trump administration officials have defended tariffs in cable television appearances and in congressional hearings as key to transforming the American economy, even as some agricultural industries languish. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing earlier this month, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota pressed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on whether instability in the agricultural markets is a result of Trump’s tariff policies.
“It has nothing to do with the tariffs,” Bessent said.
Still, there are some signs the administration could be responsive to the backlash. The Trump administration is planning to roll back tariffs on some steel and aluminum goods due to concerns the tariffs are hurting consumers, the Financial Times reported.
The soybean industry is one of the hardest hit by tariffs, which temporarily cost farmers the U.S.’ largest soybean trading partner, China. Although China fulfilled its initial purchase agreement last month and has agreed to purchase tens of millions more metric tons over the next few years, American soybean producers withstood an unprecedented five consecutive months without purchases by China.
This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
A bill moving through the Wisconsin Legislature would offer low-interest loans to small dairy farmers to boost efficiency as the state’s dairy industry rapidly consolidates into larger industrial operations.
But ahead of the state’s legislative session, which resumed in early January, major farm and dairy industry representatives pushed for changes that would allow large industrial farms to access the loans, according to lobbying communications and draft legislation obtained by Investigate Midwest through open records requests.
The state has lost nearly 18,000 dairy farms over the past two decades and, as of 2022, has roughly 6,000 operating dairy farms, with small-scale farms dwindling rapidly.
Wisconsin dairy farms with fewer than 500 cattle have decreased 67% since 2002. Almost every county in the state has lost at least half of its small farms in that same time, according to an Investigate Midwest USDA data analysis.
Senate Bill 323, introduced in July 2025, would set aside $20 million to create an innovation program for dairy farmers in the state to fund the purchase of new equipment or expand animal health practices to produce more milk. Farmers would apply through the state’s agriculture department.
Bill authors said farmers could also use the funds to develop manure management plans, create products from manure and improve animal health and outputs to produce higher-quality products, such as buttermilk. Medium and small dairy farmers can access up to $500,000 administered by the state’s agricultural department.
The bill was passed by the Senate 18 to 15 on Jan. 21 and can now be heard by the state Assembly.
Dispute over dairy herd sizes
Sen. Rob Stafsholt
State Sen. Rob Stafsholt, a New Richmond Republican who authored the bill, said economic sustainability has been an issue brought to him by farm operators throughout his rural, northwestern district.
“Some of the technology that can make farmers as efficient as possible and would help the smaller guys to compete with the bigger guys is often financially out of reach for our small and medium farms,” he said.
The Wisconsin dairy industry is worth nearly $53 billion, and its farms have become increasingly larger in recent years, while the overall number of farms continues to decrease. This trend has created legal clashes between rural towns and dairy farms across the state.
Bigger farms increase profitability by working with consolidated dairy processing companies. Small operations also work with large-scale processors but often rely on boutique dairy product sales, such as those from small-scale creameries or co-ops.
Cost is a major factor in the decline of small farms. The cost of operating a dairy farm in the U.S. has nearly doubled in the last decade, while the price farmers receive for their milk has fallen 15% in the same time frame, according to an analysis of USDA data.
The Wisconsin Farm Bureau and the Dairy Business Association, lobbying and advocacy groups for the state’s dairy and agriculture sector, both asked bill authors to remove the bill’s limit on the number of animal units a farm could have to apply for funding.
In Wisconsin, animal units are a metric primarily used to determine whether a farm meets the threshold for being considered a concentrated animal feeding operation, otherwise known as a CAFO. A single animal unit does not equate to a single animal. For example, a dairy cow is the equivalent of 1.4 animal units, while it would take roughly 30 chickens to equal a single animal unit.
Farms with 1,000 or more animal units have to apply for additional permits through the state’s Department of Natural Resources to manage waste. As farms get larger, increased waste can lead to runoff and pollution problems for nearby communities and waterways. Livestock runoff has been linked to cancers, infant deaths and miscarriages.
The current bill language sets an applicant’s limit at roughly 999 animal units, or roughly 700 dairy cattle.
In a letter to the bill authors, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau requested that the cap be removed, allowing the size of the farm to be part of the determination when applying for funding, rather than disallowing a larger farm from applying altogether.
“By aligning the program’s design with its intent, the bill can more effectively support on-farm innovation and ensure that Wisconsin farmers of all sizes have the opportunity to modernize, improve herd health, and maintain our state’s leadership in agricultural innovation,” the letter stated.
The Dairy Business Association, a trade group headquartered in Green Bay and operated by a board of executives with ties to CAFOs across the state, dairy processors and cheesemakers, told lawmakers in a letter that the state’s large farms provide stability to the milk supply and should be a part of the funding pool.
“A strong dairy economy depends on participation from farms of all sizes,” the letter states. “If this program’s eligibility criteria exclude large farms, the ripple effects will weaken — not strengthen — rural Wisconsin.”
Records show that Dairy Business Association lobbyists met with bill authors soon after the bill text was circulated in early June 2025 to discuss the herd size provision and other concerns with the legislation. The Dairy Business Association did not respond to requests for comment.
Rep. Clint Moses
The office of state Rep. Clint Moses, a Menomonie Republican who co-introduced a similar bill in the state’s Assembly, provided an early draft of a bill amendment to Dairy Business Association lobbyists ahead of the release of the amendment, according to an Aug. 5, 2025, email.
Despite meetings with lobbyists to express concerns about the bill’s language regarding herd size, the language has not changed to remove the animal unit cap.
Darin Von Ruden, president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, said that if the legislation caps farm size, the funding will help more farmers. He said the Wisconsin Farmers Union supports maintaining the animal unit limit in the current legislation and will continue to watch the bill closely.
“The dollars that are available there could be easily swallowed up by two or three of the biggest farms in the state, and then nobody else will be able to be a part of that process,” Von Ruden said.
Stafsholt, the senator who introduced the bill, said that the original purpose of the bill was to support small and medium-sized farms and that keeping a limit on animal units will stop large farms from taking larger pieces of the program’s budget.
“Going forward, I have no intention of switching that number,” he said.
Bill addresses dairy’s undocumented workforce
The bill also points to the realities of drafting legislation affecting the dairy industry and navigating the sector’s open secret: undocumented labor.
Draft legislation shows bill authors intent on blocking farms that use undocumented labor from qualifying for the loan program. The current version of the bill would only allow farms that employ workers who are authorized to work in the state to apply for the program.
There are no definitive counts of the number of undocumented laborers working on Wisconsin dairy farms, but research estimates that nearly 70% of the state’s dairy industry relies on undocumented labor.
“I don’t have an issue with (farms) doing what they are doing,” Stafsholt said. “It’s more about following the law. We want to make sure taxpayer dollars funding the dairy cattle innovation program are not necessarily being utilized by those who fail to follow the basic law.”
In September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested dairy farm workers in Manitowoc County as part of a larger raid in the area. This comes as ICE raids have hit major agricultural industries and cities, detaining workers and increasing anxiety throughout the labor force.
Lobbyists from both the Farm Bureau and the Dairy Business Association initially expressed concerns about the impact this limitation would have.
In an August email from a member of Stafsholt’s staff to the senator, meeting notes show that Dairy Business Association representatives expressed concerns about the original requirement that farms employ only individuals legally authorized to work in Wisconsin, but that language remains in the current version.
“After conversations with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection on how the bill provision will be facilitated and discussions with the bill authors, staff, and stakeholders, we are not prioritizing changing that provision,” Jason Mugnaini, a Wisconsin Farm Bureau lobbyist, told Investigate Midwest in December.
When Levi Lyle was just six years old, his father was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
With treatment, his father survived his diagnosis. The ordeal changed how he farmed.
“It created an openness in his approach to farming to start doing things differently,” Lyle said.
His father started no-till farming when the practice was still rare in Iowa. A decade ago, when Lyle, now 47, moved back to the family farm, he and his father jumped into organic farming.
“My experiences seeing my father overcome cancer, along with the Agricultural Health Survey’s Midwest cancer statistics, which point to a rural health crisis, inspire me to farm differently,” he said.
Today, Lyle grows corn and soybeans in Keokuk County, in southeast Iowa. Lyle farms about 250 acres, with 40 acres of that organic-certified. His father farms an additional 250 acres.
Lyle said introducing cover crops into his practice was a “no-brainer.”
Cattle graze on cover crops on a field at the Rodale Institute in Marion, Iowa, on Oct. 3, 2025. In states along the Mississippi River, Iowa had the most acreage with cover crops in 2022, but Wisconsin had the highest percentage of its cropland using cover crops. (Jim Slosiarek / The Gazette)
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cover crops are usually grasses or legumes that are planted between cash crop seasons to provide soil cover and improve soil health. Cover crops can reduce erosion and compaction, improve soil’s ability to hold water, reduce nutrient runoff, suppress weeds, as well as provide other services.
Despite being an advocate for cover crops, Lyle said the practice does present challenges.
“The initial challenge is that there is more labor involved,” Lyle said. Cover crops “do not pay for themselves in the short run.”
In Iowa specifically, the use of cover crops has expanded significantly in recent years, growing from 1.3 million acres in 2022 to 3.8 million acres in 2024.
The conservation practice is promoted by the state through cost share incentives. It’s an effort by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship to reduce the nutrients that go into local waters, make their way into the Mississippi River and ultimately contribute to the Gulf Dead Zone, an annually reoccurring area of reduced oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico.
According to the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, an initiative aimed at reducing nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into Iowa’s waterways, to achieve 45% nutrient reduction will require about 14 million additional acres of cover crops to be planted.
But a study published in July 2025 in the Society & Natural Resources Journal found that while the number of acres being planted with cover crops has grown, many farmers abandon the practice after one year.
“This study shows that adoption is not a one-time decision — it’s a dynamic process influenced by a range of factors,” co-author Suraj Upadhaya, assistant professor of sustainable systems at Kentucky State University, said in a news release about the study.
Why do farmers abandon cover crops?
Chris Morris, a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University, was part of a research team that interviewed more than 3,000 Iowa farmers between 2015 and 2019.
The survey showed that nearly 20% of the farmers who reported planting cover crops on their land the first year had ceased using them the following year.
However, the survey found that most of those farmers (15%) would be open to resuming the practice in the future.
Only about 4% of the farmers who participated in the survey said they have no intention of using cover crops again.
“What we found was a whole lot more shifting back and forth than we anticipated,” J. Arbuckle, professor of rural sociology at ISU, said.
Nationwide, in 2022, nearly 18 million acres, or 4.7% of total U.S. cropland, had cover crops, up 17% from 2017.
Cover crop use is most common in the eastern U.S. In states along the Mississippi River, Iowa had the most acreage with cover crops in 2022, but Wisconsin had the highest percentage of its cropland using cover crops, at nearly 8%. All 10 states saw an increase in cover crop usage from 2012 to 2022, though some states, like Tennessee and Kentucky, saw a drop in cover crop use from 2017 to 2022.
Experts say cover crops present challenges to farmers that can act as barriers to permanent adoption.
Anna Morrow, senior program manager with the Midwest Cover Crops Council, said one hurdle is that cover crop planting overlaps with the busy harvest season.
“Cover crops are a practice where a lot of the labor is right at a peak labor time in our season, right? So obviously (farmers) have to prioritize the cash crop so that they get paid,” Morrow said.
“It’s complicated because a lot of farmers are doing the cover crops in the winter, so between getting the current crop harvested, planting the cover crop, getting that terminated before the next crop, if this cover crop is not going to work in that schedule, it’s going to be abandoned,” Morris said.
Clover is part of a mix of plants that make up a cover crop on a field at the Rodale Institute in Marion, Iowa, on Oct. 3, 2025. (Jim Slosiarek / The Gazette)
Morris said barriers beyond timing abound, too, like the cost of purchasing and planting cover crops, balancing the cover crops with other farm work, and challenges that come with farming on rented land.
“A lot of farmers are in really short-term leases, and a lot of farmers feel like landlords aren’t interested in investing in conservation practices on rented land because they may or may not be farming that land one or two or three years from now,” Arbuckle said.
In Lyle’s case, he owns the 40 acres he uses for organic farming, but he and his father lease the rest of their land. They plant cover crops on both the land they own and rent.
Lyle said for him it’s “economically justifiable” to plant cover crops on his leased land because he expects a “reduction in number of field passes, reduced herbicides and reduced fertilizer use due to the nutrient scavenging capacity of cover crops.”
To address cost barriers and encourage the use of cover crops, various federal and state programs offer cost-share incentives. Lyle said this year he has been awarded cover crop funding for 150 acres, getting paid $10 per acre. On average, it costs producers about $60 per acre to pay for cover crops.
Morris said these programs are helpful, but farmers told him they often don’t pay enough, require complicated, time-sucking paperwork and only last one to three years.
But cover crops are a long game, Morris said. While use of cover crops can reduce the need for fertilizer, increase soil health and lead to better productivity, he said those benefits can be difficult to measure and can take years to materialize.
“It’s hard for farmers to justify that high economic cost of cover crops in any given year if there’s not going to be an immediate payoff. Most of these farmers are making marginal profits in any given year, if any, and some are at a net loss. So, there’s a huge weight on farmers’ shoulders of trying to keep the farm going, especially if it’s a farm that’s been in their families for generations,” Morris said. “Anything that could potentially put them out of business is going to seem like a threat.”
Finding new solutions
Cover crops are generally not harvested; rather, their benefits come from simply being on the land. At the end of their life they’re terminated using herbicides or manual methods, like mowing, and tilled into the soil or left atop it as mulch.
But the Forever Green Initiative, which is housed at the University of Minnesota, works to increase cover crop adoption in Minnesota by developing varieties that can improve soil health and also be harvested for sale.
“Agricultural science has not focused on this until very recently, so there are very few options for farmers to do that,” said Mitch Hunter, co-director of the Forever Green Initiative. “We’re working on over 15 different species, and they’re all aimed at filling that niche of a harvestable over winter crop that is winter hardy in the Upper Midwest that can fit into existing crop rotations or become part of a more diverse rotation and as a market.”
He said some commercial and harvestable cover crops have included winter camelina and the perennial grain Kernza, a cousin to annual wheat. He said those crops are “on the cusp of being commercial.” Commercialized cover crops also include alfalfa, winter barley and winter durum.
“The whole point is to fill that gap,” Hunter said.
Pivoting to cover crops that can be harvested and sold is a “natural progression” for many farmers, Morrow said.
“If they start to try cover crops, and they say, ‘Hey, this is working, and I’m seeing benefits.’ And then they’ll say, ‘Well, why can’t I do a winter annual crop and get some cash from this?’” Morrow said. “The Midwest (is) pretty focused on corn and soybeans, but I think there’s some growing interest in winter, annual cash crops.”
Meanwhile, the overall number of acres invested in cover crop practices has been increasing in recent years, even with some disadoption.
Newly sprouted rye plants grow in rows at the Rodale Institute Midwest Organic Center in Marion, Iowa, on Jan. 17, 2023. (Savannah Blake / The Gazette)
“This study really reflects that farming is a year-to-year business,” said Sean Stokes, research director at the Rodale Institute Midwest Organic Center in Marion, Iowa. “A farmer might only plant a cover crop, like cereal rye, before soybeans, and then when they go to corn the next year, they might not plant that again. But then when they go back to soybeans, they might use cover crops again.”
“Every farmer and every farm is unique, and they’re all going to have different motivations for what’s driving their cover crop adoption,” he said.
Stokes said these motivations could include concerns over water quality or improving soil health.
“For a lot of farmers, it’s a business decision,” Stokes said. “Are they going to see more money per acre in the following years when using cover crops or are they going to lose money? That’s where there is some risk.”
For Lyle, it’s a risk work taking.
“Every acre in the Midwest would benefit from being cover cropped,” Lyle said.
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