The Big Farm Lie: Trump's National Farm Security Action Plan

Trump’s farmland crackdown solves nothing for farmers and ignores the real crisis

This week, the Trump administration unveiled its much-publicized National Farm Security Action Plan, pledging to “take back our land” from foreign adversaries and secure American agriculture. It all sounds bold and patriotic until you look under the surface.

In reality, this is less a serious farm-support initiative and more a political spectacle, a classic case of solving a manufactured crisis while leaving real problems untouched.

---

What the Plan Claims to Do

According to the administration, the plan will ban foreign nationals—especially Chinese entities—from buying U.S. farmland. Officials also promised to reclaim land already owned by “adversarial” interests near military sites, cancel hundreds of USDA research contracts with foreign ties, and increase oversight of the agricultural supply chain.

Framed as a matter of national security and sovereignty, the plan casts foreign farmland ownership as an existential threat to America’s heartland, with President Trump calling it “a crucial fight to protect the soul of our nation’s farms.”

---

Is This Just a Biden Rebrand?

Some outlets have downplayed the plan as a simple rebranding of Biden-era efforts to increase oversight of foreign land ownership. However, that comparison overlooks the broader context.

While the Biden administration did move to improve transparency around foreign farmland, it focused on supply‑chain resilience, sustainability, and climate adaptation. Biden’s approach treated foreign ownership as a regulatory and food‑security challenge rather than a national security emergency.

By contrast, the Trump plan is framed as a combative crackdown on adversaries, with aggressive promises of land seizures and mass contract cancellations. This isn’t just a rebrand; it’s a political escalation of what had been a relatively minor policy concern.

---

What the Plan Does and Doesn’t Do

On closer inspection, the flaws in the Trump administration’s approach become obvious.

First, the administration’s plan is largely redundant. More than half of U.S. states, including Texas, Florida, and South Dakota, have already passed laws restricting foreign ownership of farmland, often specifically targeting buyers from China and a handful of other nations. Texas, for example, signed legislation just this year banning Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian entities from acquiring any real property in the state, including farmland. These state-level bans, many of which are bipartisan, have been in place for years in some places. Yet they have done little to change land prices or ease access for family farmers, illustrating that even where these measures are already in place, they remain largely symbolic. The federal plan repackages this same approach, doubling down on a solution that doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

Why have those laws been ineffective? Foreign entities own just about three percent of U.S. farmland, with China’s share amounting to less than one percent. Banning that tiny fraction won’t put a single seed in a farmer’s hand or lower the price of an acre of land. Meanwhile, the administration ignores the much larger and more damaging trend: massive consolidation by domestic corporations, Wall Street funds, and agribusiness giants.

The real squeeze on farmland comes from these domestic forces, which treat land as a speculative asset rather than a livelihood. As the National Family Farm Coalition recently stated, “Corporate consolidation takes viable agricultural land off the market and drives up costs for smaller farmers. If policymakers are serious about protecting farmers and food security, they need to stop treating land as a speculative asset and start putting it back in the hands of working farmers.”

Furthermore, this plan does not enhance farmers’ access to credit, equipment, or markets. It ignores the devastating impact of climate change and extreme weather, which have left many farmers struggling to recover from floods, droughts, and fires. It does not restore the USDA’s regional climate hubs, which were closed earlier in this administration, nor does it replace the farmworkers who aggressive immigration raids have driven out.

See our recent reporting here:

When Farmers Lose, Who Wins?

When pressed about labor shortages exacerbated by these raids, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dismissed the need for meaningful reform entirely. “Ultimately, the answer on this is automation,” she said, adding that the labor could also be drawn from “the 34 million able‑bodied adults in our Medicaid program.” This suggestion that workers can be replaced by machines or coerced out of poverty programs reveals a profound ignorance of both the realities of farm work and the human costs of such policies. It reduces farmworkers to interchangeable parts in a machine, ignoring the skills and humanity they bring to the job.

Even more troubling, Trump himself proposed a so‑called “owner responsibility” program in which farmers would personally vouch for their undocumented workers to keep them from deportation. At a campaign stop, he suggested, “If a farmer has been with one of these people… for 15 years… they know them… We’re going to put the farmers in charge.”

While framed as a compromise, this idea effectively ties workers’ fates to their employers, enshrining a dependency that bears an unsettling resemblance to indentured servitude. Rather than providing clear legal pathways and protections, it keeps workers in a liminal, precarious state, dependent on the goodwill of their “owner” to remain in the country. Such rhetoric not only misunderstands the agricultural workforce, but it also echoes some of the darkest chapters in America’s history.

While the administration hypes this plan as a bold solution, it continues to undermine farmers and workers on every other front: gutting FEMA and USDA programs, slashing SNAP and school meal initiatives that sustain local farm economies, and pursuing tariffs that have choked off key export markets.

---

What Farmers Actually Need

If the administration truly wanted to help farmers, it wouldn’t scapegoat a negligible fraction of land ownership or push workers toward machines and dependency. It would confront the real barriers to a thriving, just farm economy.

Farmers require a serious commitment to breaking up corporate monopolies and maintaining access to farmland. That means capping the amount of land a single entity can own, enforcing antitrust laws, and taxing speculative holdings to make room for independent farmers.

They need a rebuilt safety net with restored climate hubs and disaster assistance to help them weather the floods, fires, and droughts that are already here. They need a stable workforce supported by humane immigration reform, not raids and servitude‑style arrangements.

They also deserve freedom from the corporate stranglehold over seeds and equipment. Supporting open-source seed programs and curbing “terminator” patents would give farmers greater independence and lower costs.

Ultimately, farmers require open markets, both domestically and internationally. That means repairing the damage from reckless tariffs, investing in USAID and school meal programs, and making sure the benefits of farming flow to those actually working the land, not just to Wall Street.

These aren’t radical demands. They’re what it takes to keep family farms alive and rural communities strong. And they stand in stark contrast to the empty symbolism of the administration’s latest plan.

---

The Pattern: Political Theater Over Solutions

This is not just poor policy — it’s a familiar playbook. Over and over again, this administration has manufactured a crisis, whipped up outrage, and announced a hollow “solution” that does little or nothing to solve the actual problem.

We saw it with tariffs and trade wars that devastated export markets while claiming to protect farmers. We saw it with ICE raids that gutted the farm labor force under the guise of defending American jobs. We saw it with the closure of climate hubs and the gutting of SNAP, USDA, and school food programs, all while telling farmers they were being saved.

And now we’re seeing it again, this time with farmland.

---

Farmers Deserve Better

Family farmers deserve real support, real investment, and real solutions, not more photo ops and culture‑war headlines. Farmers are not pawns in a political game.

If we truly care about America’s food system, we must confront the real threats: corporate greed, climate chaos, broken markets, and inequitable policies. Anything less — including this latest plan — is just another big lie.

What would a real plan for family farmers look like to you? Let us know in the comments.

Bibliography:

• “Farmland for Farmers Act Introduced in Congress.” Hoosier Ag Today, March 26, 2024.

• “Trump Administration Launches National Farm Security Action Plan.” USDA News Release, July 8, 2025.

• “Farmland Ownership and Foreign Investment.” National Agricultural Law Center, accessed July 9, 2025.

• “Parity as Radical Pragmatism: Centering Farm Justice and Agrarian Expertise in Agricultural Policy.” Journal of Peasant Studies, October 2023.

• “Trump Administration Unveils Farm Security Plan to Counter Chinese Land Purchases.” New York Post, July 8, 2025.

• “U.S. to Ban Chinese Purchases of Farmland, Citing National Security.” Washington Post, July 8, 2025.

• “US Farm Secretary Says ‘No Amnesty’ for Farmworkers, Suggests Automation Instead.” Reuters, July 8, 2025.

• “Farmland: Foreign Ownership and American Security.” Agriculture.com, July 8, 2025.

• “Farm Security: National Security — Trump Administration Takes Bold Action to Elevate American Agriculture.” USDA Newsroom, July 8, 2025.

• “Farmland for Farmers Act Introduced in Congress.” Hoosier Ag Today, March 26, 2024.