Thesis: Decentralization of the means of production and commerce is the single greatest safeguard of freedom. Industrial liberty protects individual liberty.
In 2025, the USDA provided an unusually high level of financial support to U.S. farmers amid challenges from trade disruptions, inflationary input costs, and low commodity prices. The key initiative was the $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) Program, announced on December 8, 2025, as a one-time "bridge" payment to help farmers until enhanced safety nets from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) take effect in October 2026. This program allocated up to $11 billion for row crop producers (covering commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and others) and $1 billion for specialty crops and sugar. Payments were capped at $155,000 per farm, with an adjusted gross income limit of $900,000, and disbursements began in late February 2026. This bailout was part of broader ad hoc assistance exceeding $30 billion since January 2025, including over $2.5 billion in block grants for 2023–2024 losses. However, it primarily benefited commodity farmers, drawing criticism for not fully addressing estimated sector-wide losses of $35–44 billion in 2025. Overall, these measures aimed to stabilize the sector but were seen by some as short-term fixes rather than long-term solutions.
Most farmers agree subsidies cannot fix a broken and manipulated market — a market that is not in equilibrium. If soybeans stop selling, their supply ought to follow suit, except for the fact that whatever has no demand is insured by the USDA and its lobby.
The takeover of agriculture has been a slow encroachment of centralized power determining what we as American individuals can do with our operations and destiny. It is not our government that has caused tyranny, but an administrative state which answers only to its corporate donors. The intervention is only framed as a retrospective response to China retaliating with tariffs, when financial intervention is also a preemptive action to degrade sovereign and self-sufficient agricultural systems.
The USDA has long been a victim of a larger agenda to wean individual Americans from having any ability to shape their own prosperity. There was a time when Americans feared the government even bearing gifts. Strictly speaking, state measures are causing market dysfunction in rural economies. And though the power of the USDA is mild and unassuming, it contains the shadow of tyranny — providing for our security, foreseeing our needs, supplying inputs, and determining our industry. Regulation has divided the inheritance of the destiny of the West and led to our descent into poverty.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, people still had some vague ideal of balance between industrialization and agriculture. A century later, a reversal is inevitable, where agricultural investment will surpass purely commercial investment. When Western agriculture ceases to be operational and margins fail, the government will come with a $900 billion stimulus package, called something like the Agriculture Restoration Reform Act. This will not happen yet, but marginal individual adjustment is key to a robust evolution and survival.
The agricultural economy must make changes to its internal structure which will change the relative prices of new and different products. Reliance on bailouts prevents our necessary evolution. Of course, this cannot be made into a crisis. The crisis began a century ago.
During the Great Depression, in 1928, Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street speculator and the fiftieth richest man in the U.S., along with Beardsley Ruml (president of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, and later Treasurer of R.H. Macy and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York), drew from an agricultural control operation in Germany and sought to apply price "parity" on behalf of FDR's New Deal.
The New Deal's Parity Price Plan set price floors for commodities, using non-recourse loans (government buying surplus at a set price) and production controls to stabilize markets and restore purchasing power lost during the Depression. Import limits were established, and farmers were even paid to reduce production.
F.A. Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, "Few people will deny that the main problem has become that of how policy can extricate itself from the situation it has produced and that American agriculture would be in a healthier state if the government had never meddled with prices and quantities and methods of production." I suppose it was the AAA where the patronization of farmers began, and the justification of the American farmer's "rugged individualism" as the major premise for maintaining him at the taxpayers' expense. Even today, the USDA is supervising all of farmers' production to make sure we don't make a mistake and overproduce.
There is a solution, and all farmers know it: a parity of agricultural crops not to cheap commodity markets, but to America's most important industries — defense, construction, housing, and energy.
Enotrium is the new oasis which will bridge agriculture to real industry. USDA can have the century off.