Friday has become a happy tradition in our house; Johanna and I have been doing our Table Talk podcast on Friday afternoons for a few months now.
But this week, I’m on the road in rural Georgia, reporting on a crucial story: How are American farmers dealing with the twin Trump shocks of high tariffs and the Iran war?
Because of the war, fertilizer and diesel fuel costs have gone up substantially, and that means that most farmers are looking at a very tough year. Some of them won’t make it. The American Farm Bureau just came out with a survey of farmers that found 78 percent of farmers in the South report that they cannot afford the inputs they need to make a crop this year—fertilizer and diesel fuel, especially.
In the video above, listen to Sid Prescott tell me about another huge issue here: Drought. I rode in his tractor as he mowed his stunted, drought-scorched oats. He was hoping to sell them—now they’re dying, and he’s turning them into hay to feed his cattle—and taking a huge loss.
There’s a political angle to the story, too. Farmers have long been among the staunchest Republican voters in the country, and New York City native Donald Trump has done even better with them than previous GOP candidates. Almost 80 percent of voters in America’s most farming-dependent counties backed Donald Trump in 2024. And I’m talking to people here about that.
But this is a story that’s about more than politics. One thing you hear a lot from the farmers in Burke County: this isn’t a simple story. Trump‘s tariffs, the war he launched against Iran, they’re just the latest blows to a farm economy that has been challenged for years.
Over the last decade farming in America’s changed dramatically. New techniques and technologies, new costs. New competition. And what I hear over and over here is that farm policy in America just hasn’t changed with the times. That failure in Washington—in Congress—makes everything worse for farmers.
So I’ll be reporting on all this for a Field Report coming out next week.
And next Friday, I’ll be back at the kitchen table with Johanna for another edition of Table Talk.
See you then!
—Terry and Johanna
