Illinois ag director says Trump trade policies are ‘crushing’ farmers
[December 13, 2025]
By Peter Hancock
SPRINGFIELD – The Trump administration announced this week that it would
make $12 billion available in the form of one-time payments to U.S.
farmers to help weather what it calls “temporary trade market
disruptions” in the wake of ongoing tariff disputes with America’s
trading partners.
But Jerry Costello II, director of the Illinois Department of
Agriculture, said this week the latest aid package is less than half the
size of the one offered in response to trade disputes during Trump’s
first administration. He said the money being offered now is not nearly
enough to make up for the losses farmers are suffering.
“Tariffs are crushing farmers again,” Costello said in a statement.
“Financial losses are worse this time around, yet the aid package is 50%
smaller. We’re seeing repeated devastation with greater losses than
Trump 1. It defies logic.”
Payment details
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the “Farmer Bridge
Assistance Program” Monday. It said the funds are authorized under the
Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act and will be administered
through the federal Farm Service Agency, which also administers most
other farm credit, subsidy and conservation programs.
Of the $12 billion being made available, USDA said, $11 billion will be
earmarked for farmers who produce row crops. Those include corn and
soybeans, the two biggest crops in Illinois, as well as barley, cotton,
oats, peanuts, sorghum, wheat, and several other crops.
The remaining $1 billion is being reserved for other crops, including
sugar and specialty crops, although details of those payments are still
being developed.
The payments will be based on the number of acres of eligible crops each
farmer planted, as reported to FSA, as well as statistical models that
use production cost estimates, average yields and market prices to
estimate each farmer’s losses.
USDA said eligible farmers should make sure their 2025 acreage is
reported to FSA by 5 p.m. eastern time Friday, Dec. 19. Eligible farmers
can expect payments to be released by Feb. 28, 2026.
Sufficiency of payments
In its statement Monday, USDA said the program would use “a uniform
formula to cover a portion of the modeled losses” farmers incurred
during the 2025 crop year, but it did not say how large of a portion
those payments would cover.
Costello, however, said the limited size of the program ensures it will
not be enough to cover all the losses farmers have suffered as a result
of the trade disputes.
“It’s a much, much smaller relief package than last time, and this is a
much larger problem than what we experienced during the first Trump
administration and the first Trump tariffs,” he said in an interview
with Capitol News Illinois.
In 2017, Costello noted, the Trump administration imposed significant
tariffs on various goods coming into the United States from China. That
prompted China to impose retaliatory tariffs on a number of U.S.
exports, including soybeans and other agricultural products.
Illinois is the nation’s leading producer of soybeans, he said, and
China was the biggest export market for that crop.
“In 2017, tariffs are put in place. In 2018 and 2019, there’s an
estimated loss of over $27 billion in the agricultural space,” Costello
said. “What’s interesting about that is about 72% of that literally was
specific to soybeans, and about 95% of that was specific to China. So at
that point in time – again, first Trump administration – the aid package
was $23.1 (billion).”
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Jerry Costello II, director of the Illinois Department of
Agriculture, speaks at a Christian County farm alongside Gov. JB
Pritzker (left) and Cameron Joost, assistant director of the
Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. The group
discussed the impact of tariffs on Illinois farmers in an October
visit. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Jerry Nowicki)
Costello also noted that nearly a third of the agricultural losses at
that time were concentrated in just three states – Iowa, Illinois and
Kansas.
This time around, Costello said, the global trade disputes extend beyond
just China, and in the agricultural sector they involve many more crops
than corn and soybeans. But the aid package is only half the size as the
one in the first Trump administration.
Long-term costs
Costello said the trade wars have affected the farm economy on at least
two fronts – lower prices due to shrinking export markets, and higher
production costs because of tariffs imposed on imported goods such as
fertilizers, tractors and other kinds of farm equipment.
During the first Trump administration, he said, Illinois’ sales of
soybeans to China fell from $1.3 billion in 2017 to $116 million in 2018
– roughly a 90% drop. By 2020, they had fallen further, to just $29
million.
“So, I mean, those are major, major losses,” he said.
One result, he said, is that farmers have ended up storing their
products in silos, either because the market prices are too low or there
simply aren’t enough buyers.
“So when you’ve got all of your storage that’s being consumed, or most
of your storage being consumed, a lot of farmers are forced to sell into
a market that’s depressed if they have nowhere to go with it,” he said.
“So they’re forced to take those losses.”
Meanwhile, he said, tariffs being imposed on products coming into the
United States from overseas are driving up the cost for farmers to put a
crop in the ground.
“Just this past year, because of tariffs, nitrogen tariffs are up 10%,”
he said. “Herbicide, pesticide, insecticide are up 20%. Ag equipment, up
13%; tractors, up 16%. So there are huge implications because of the
tariffs on a lot of the inputs.”
While those factors are affecting farmers’ bottom lines today, Costello
said his biggest concern is that they could become long-term drags on
the farm economy, making it difficult or impossible for individuals and
families to earn their livelihoods by farming.
“Right now, we have more people farming that are over 75 than under 35,”
he said. “It’s scary, because 58.6 is the average age of a farmer in the
state of Illinois right now. So getting new people into agriculture,
retaining the folks that have had the guts to try to come into a tough …
those new folks are the most vulnerable, and those are the ones that it
worries me will not be able to sustain this type of a downturn.”
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick
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