A pledge to the people who plant, raise, repair, and feed America
Before daylight, the work is already underway. A farmer checks a pivot, mends a gate, feeds stock, watches the weather, calls the co-op, and makes decisions that have to carry a family through another season. There is no pause button when a calf is coming, a storm is building, a fire is ripping through, or the crop is ready.
That work feeds America. It deserves more than speeches after an election or sympathy after a disaster. It deserves a country whose laws, credit system, markets, and monetary design are built to let the people who produce food keep doing it.
Our Party begins with a simple promise: if you work the land, the land should help secure your family’s future—not become the reason you lose it.
The squeeze is real—even when the headlines say agriculture is doing fine
Agriculture is not one single balance sheet. A strong cattle market can sit beside a struggling crop operation. A national income forecast can look steady while a family farm is carrying thin margins, aging equipment, and a note that comes due before the crop is sold.
Farmers are asked to carry risk at every turn:
- Seed, fertilizer, chemicals, fuel, feed, repairs, and labor must be paid for before harvest or sale.
- Weather can erase a year’s work in a single afternoon.
- A low bid at the elevator, a processing bottleneck, or a lost export market can wreck a plan that was sound when the seed went in.
- A family may own valuable land on paper while lacking the cash flow to make payroll, replace a tractor part, or hold on until the next marketing window.
And while grocery bills rise, the farm’s share of the consumer food dollar is much smaller than most people realize. In 2023, farms received 15.9 cents of each dollar spent on domestically produced food; the rest reflected costs and value added after food left the farm.
This is not an argument against processors, truckers, grocers, or equipment dealers. America needs every link in the chain. It is an argument for a system in which the person who takes the first risk is not always the last to be paid.
What producers are saying from the field
The numbers matter. So do the people living inside them.
In the July 2026 Purdue University/CME Group survey of 405 U.S. producers, 46 percent named high input costs as their operation’s biggest challenge. Looking ahead, farmers also pointed to farm transition and succession, followed by cost control. That is a warning about more than this year’s balance sheet: farmers are asking whether a viable operation can still be handed to the next generation.
Midwest row-crop growers report that they have already made the cost cuts they can make without risking yields. Their concern is not simply that fertilizer is expensive; it is that cutting nutrients, crop protection, or machinery maintenance too far may save cash today while reducing production tomorrow. They want stronger demand and dependable markets, not a cycle in which payment arrives after the economic damage is done.
Farmers interviewed across Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Tennessee describe the same timing problem from different angles: inputs must be paid for before a crop is sold; by the time a low price, trade shock, or weather loss is clear, the operating bill is already there. These are not slogans. They are cash-flow realities.
For ranchers, the crisis can look different. In drought-stricken parts of the Rockies, families have spent days hauling water and making hard choices about whether to reduce cattle numbers, buy feed, or hold breeding stock for the future. For fruit, vegetable, and nursery growers, labor is not a talking point either: worker shortages, escalating wage and compliance costs, and reliance on H-2A labor are driving costly automation decisions.
That is why a serious farm policy cannot assume every farm has the same problem. It must be practical enough for the corn-and-soybean operation choosing next year’s rotation, the cattle family hauling water, the dairy trying to staff a seven-day operation, the orchard racing a harvest window, and the beginning farmer trying to get a first foothold on land.
Land should be a home, a livelihood, and an inheritance—not a permanent tax meter
For a farm family, land is not a stock ticker. It is pasture, topsoil, a shop, a home place, a windbreak planted by a grandfather, and a future a child may one day choose to carry forward.
Yet rising land values can bring a punishing contradiction: a family becomes richer on paper while the annual tax bill rises against the very property that makes its work possible.
Our Party’s answer is plain: no recurring land tax on productive family farms. No farmer should be forced to sell acreage, borrow against the home place, or cut back on reinvestment merely to meet a tax bill tied to a valuation far beyond a season’s income.
But rural services still have to be supported. Under this system, essential public services are funded through direct monetary issuance by the national government, allocated transparently to states and local communities by formula. This replaces land-based extraction with a stable public funding stream that does not force liquidation of productive assets.
Put credit back in service of production—and stabilize money at the source
A farm loan should help a producer plant, repair, improve, and survive the gap between expenses and revenue. It should not turn one hard season into years of compounding interest.
Our Party supports a system of interest-free, principal-repayment public credit for productive use. This credit is issued for real economic activity: planting crops, maintaining livestock, repairing equipment, improving infrastructure, and bridging seasonal cash-flow gaps.
This system is not speculative finance. It is a public production tool with strict eligibility rules, local agricultural review, transparent accounting, and hard limits tied to real capacity in the economy.
When new credit is issued, it injects money into the productive sector. To maintain price stability, the system uses a variable consumption tax applied only to final personal consumption to remove money from circulation in proportion to economic conditions.
This consumption tax is not a funding mechanism for government. It does not “pay for” public services. Instead, it functions as a monetary balancing tool—a controlled withdrawal of money from the consumption stream to offset the creation of new productive credit.
Key principles:
- Money enters the economy through productive, interest-free lending.
- Money is removed through a variable consumption tax on final goods and services.
- The tax does not apply to production inputs such as seed, feed, fertilizer, equipment, repair parts, or fuel used in production.
- The rate adjusts dynamically to stabilize purchasing power and prevent inflationary pressure from excess demand.
In this system, credit builds farms. The consumption adjustment keeps the currency stable. One expands productive capacity; the other prevents overheating in final consumption markets.
Fair markets, dependable labor, and disaster help that arrives before the farm is gone
Farmers deserve a fair field when they buy inputs and when they sell what they produce.
Our Party will insist on open competition, clear contracts, prompt payment, and strong enforcement against deceptive, coercive, or anticompetitive conduct. No producer should be trapped by a contract they cannot understand or charged more because there is no meaningful choice of supplier or buyer.
The same practical spirit applies to labor. Farms need a legal, dependable workforce, especially when planting, harvest, and animal care cannot wait. The current H-2A system provides a lawful seasonal route but has real limits. Reform should be orderly, lawful, humane, and usable in the real world—protecting workers while giving producers a predictable way to meet legitimate labor needs.
Disaster policy must also meet the calendar of farm life. Assistance should arrive quickly after verified losses, use simple applications, provide fast preliminary payments, and reduce bureaucratic delay. A bad year should not become the end of a farm because help arrived too late.
Feed America with American capacity
America remains a major agricultural producer and exporter. At the same time, agricultural imports exceeded exports by $41 billion in 2025.
Some imports are necessary and appropriate. Others reflect gaps in domestic processing, supply chains, or market structure. The concern is not trade itself—it is resilience.
Food security is not just the number of bushels grown. It is whether we have the processing, storage, fertilizer supply, transportation, skilled labor, and local markets to keep food moving when a foreign supply line, trade dispute, storm, or corporate bottleneck fails.
That means building domestic capacity: more competitive input suppliers, regional processing and cold storage, resilient transportation, fair access to local and institutional markets, and farm policies that make it possible for another generation to enter the business.
A country that stands with the farm
The farmer does not ask for a life without risk. Farming has never been that. The farmer asks for an honest chance: to borrow without being buried, to keep the land without being taxed off it, to sell into a fair market, to find lawful labor, to recover from disaster, and to pass on a working farm—not a pile of debt—to the next generation.
That is the standard our Party adopts.
Let the people who plant and raise America’s food keep more of the value they create. Let productive land remain in the hands of the families who steward it. Let credit serve production, and let monetary design serve stability rather than speculation.
America is strongest when the people who feed it are strong enough to stay.
Research sources
USDA data on beef imports and Argentina’s quota
Purdue/CME producer survey, July 2026
AgWeb interviews with Midwest growers
AP reporting from Nebraska soybean farms
AP reporting on fertilizer costs
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