Why Now?
The Farm Indusrty is in Crisis
American agriculture is the most productive in the world. It feeds families here, supplies markets abroad, and anchors the rural communities that built this country. Today it is in trouble.
Net farm income has been falling. Input costs are up. Export markets that took generations to build have been disrupted overnight by tariff policy made without consultation and reversed without warning. Trading partners we once led are signing deals with our competitors. The United States, long the world's leading food exporter, is now a net food importer.
Foreign aid programs that moved American-grown commodities into hungry markets have been cut. Federal research that pioneers the next generation of farm products has been gutted. Labor shortages are leaving fruit on the vine and meat plants short-staffed. Rural hospitals are closing. Young people are leaving.
This is not the inevitable working of the market. It is the result of policy choices. And it can be reversed by better ones.
rural counties have lost critical health care services over the past decade.
1 in 3
51%
of farmers say high input costs are their biggest concern
58
is the average age of the American farmer.
A Letter to the Country
In January, more than a dozen former senior ag officials wrote to the leadership of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees. The letter laid out the depth of the crisis on American farms and what Congress could do about it. It broke through. It was covered by The New York Times, by the trade press, and by farm-country outlets from coast to coast.
Six months later, things are worse. The follow-up letter we are releasing today picks up where the first one left off and makes a sharper, more urgent case: the time for half-measures has passed. American agriculture needs a new direction, and the country needs to insist on it.
What We're Calling For
Investment in What Comes Next
Public investment in agricultural research has fueled every major leap in American farm productivity for a century. The cuts now underway will be felt for a generation. We need sustained federal investment in the science that opens new value-added markets, from renewable fuels and bioproducts to crops that perform under tougher conditions.
Markets
Farmers want customers, not handouts. That means restoring the trade relationships that took generations to build, opening new ones, and ending the policy whiplash that has made the United States an unreliable partner. Government payments now make up a growing share of farm income. That is a symptom, not a strategy.
Rural Communities Worth Living In
A farm economy cannot survive without the towns, schools, hospitals, and broadband connections that make rural life viable. Rural hospital closures, the loss of rural health care professionals, and disinvestment in rural infrastructure are not separate problems. They are part of the same problem.
Voices from Across the Country
Behind every statistic is a family, a business, and a community trying to make a living from the land. Farmers across America are facing rising costs, shrinking margins, labor shortages, and uncertain markets. Their stories put a human face on the challenges confronting American agriculture.
About Restore American Agriculture
Restore American Agriculture was founded by a bipartisan group of former United States Secretaries of Agriculture, members of Congress, and senior agriculture leaders, joined by farmers and ranchers from across the country. We share a single conviction: the American farm economy is in crisis, and the country owes its farmers a serious answer, not another round of stopgap payments.
This effort grew out of a letter to the leadership of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees earlier this year.
The response from farmers, the press, and Congress made one thing clear. The appetite for an honest, non-partisan voice on the farm economy is real, and growing. Restore American Agriculture is what came next.
IN THE NEWS
