President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-and-spending law, known as the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” includes subsidies for some Georgia farmers, but tariffs could threaten to undermine some of those gains.
The law includes more than $60 billion in spending to support agriculture over the next decade, with most of that expected to prop up prices for 22 crops, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The law increases subsidies by 10-20%, which are paid if market prices for a particular crop dip below a reference price. The subsidies in the law protect some of Georgia’s most valuable crops, including peanuts and cotton, while increasing the number of eligible acres.
Credit: Chris Hunt
Credit: Chris Hunt
Bart Davis, who grows cotton, corn and peanuts and raises beef cattle on around 8,000 acres of land, 200 miles south of Atlanta in Colquitt County, expects to benefit from the bill.
South Georgia is projected to receive the most aid in the state, according to an analysis conducted by University of Illinois researchers. Colquitt County is projected to receive an additional $84 million over the next decade, while neighboring Mitchell County is expected to receive $103 million.
Davis, a second-generation farmer, said the programs aimed at providing farmers financial protections from drops in crop prices and revenues will provide relief during hard times. But it won’t be enough.
“The reference prices will help us some, but it’s not going to get us to where we need to be,” he said.
The new law comes as farmers have dealt with price fluctuations in a volatile global market, along with rising costs for equipment, fertilizer and other resources.
“Everything went up in the last four or five years, dramatically, and our commodity prices haven’t gone up to offset the losses,” Davis said.
Some farmers who will see benefits from the new law worry they will be offset by tariffs, leaving producers like Davis feeling concerned about future finances.
“I lose sleep every night over this,” said Davis, chairman of the Georgia Cotton Commission.
Georgia U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Democrat from Albany, expects farmers’ exports to suffer from levies charged by foreign ports in retaliation for tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on imports to the United States.
“Tariffs will hurt some of our producers tremendously as they try to export some of the agricultural products that they produce in this country,” he said. “And to address that, the administration will have to try to make those farmers whole in some way.”
He also said the agricultural-related provisions in the spending law have shortcomings, including cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.
“We should be able to protect our farmers, and we should be able to provide nutrition,” Bishop said.
Critics say the price protections in the law won’t provide the same relief to all farmers. The National Farm Coalition, which advocates for small farmers, said the law doesn’t meaningfully support independent farmers.
Small fruit and vegetable growers won’t see the same relief as larger producers who received a bump in reference prices.
There are about 570 farmers in Hall County, mostly growing fruits, berries and tree nuts. But the county is projected to receive an additional $202,000 in aid over the next decade. That’s one quarter of 1% of the aid coming to Colquitt, which has 430 farmers.
Ford Ramsey, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, said that how the state’s agriculture sector could be affected by tariffs depends on the crop.
He said there could be concern that if a tariff is imposed on a country that imports a large quantity of a particular product, such as cotton, that country may place a retaliatory tariff on it.
“We saw a lot of that during the first trade war, during the first Trump administration,” he said.
The provisions in the spending law aiding farmers, he said, are a major cushion for agriculture.
Davis is unsure about what the future holds. If the same trends of rising input costs and farm consolidation persist, he said, it will become increasingly difficult for family farms to stay in business.
Within the last three years, Davis said he’s run at a loss.
“You’ve got to stop the bleeding at some point in time,” he said.
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