Seed Money
How $12 Billion Skips the Farm
They’re calling it Farmer Bridge Assistance.
Not a ladder out of the hole. A bridge.
Just enough to get you to next season, buy more inputs, and climb back onto the treadmill.
Here are the specs:
$12 billion total.
$11 billion for row crops—corn, soy, sorghum, cotton, etc.
A billion for specialty crops.
Payment cap of $155,000 per entity.
Means-tested at $900,000 Adjusted Gross Income.
Checks cut by late February 2026. Just in time to pay your seed and chemical bills for spring planting.
That timing is not an accident. It’s the point.
I try to stay out of politics.
The entire system is rigged to run on our frustration.
But this one I can’t keep my mouth shut about.
The trade war didn’t start the breakup, but it sure as hell packed China’s bags so they could move in with Brazil.
We lost the market, so now we get a stipend.
And now the current administration is celebrating the “fix,” blaming high input costs on the last guy while bailing out the very monopolies that have us at knifepoint.
Maybe it’s four-dimensional chess, but all I see is a shell game.
The money flows up, the blame flows down, and the farmer is just a prop in their theater.
They keep us drunk on outrage and numb on the scroll.
Too busy fighting each other to notice they’re both cashing the same checks.
Both hands are in your pocket.
They just wear different colored gloves.
The American farmer is the political bullet sponge, while the real beneficiaries—the input cartels—stay in the shadows.
Companies like Bayer and Mosaic and Corteva lobby for the right to keep your margins at zero, and then Washington cuts a check to make sure you can still afford their invoice.
The press release says this covers rising input costs.
Read that again.
They’re using taxpayer money to pay the very bills that are bankrupting you. It’s a corporate subsidy laundered through your checking account.
Monopolies stay fat while the farmer takes the rap.
$155,000 sounds like a lot of money. But when you’re down $200 an acre on any meaningful acreage, it’s a band-aid on a bullet wound.
And the $900,000 AGI limit? That’s for headlines. It lets politicians say they aren’t funding corporate mega-farms.
In reality, $900k AGI is a guy moving millions through a checking account to keep the lights on, carrying enough debt to make a normal person vomit.
But it lets them call it help for the little guy while the machine keeps running.
And I’m in the machine too. I’m a seed dealer.
The margin on seed stinks as bad as it does for the person growing it. This bailout money passes through us in about thirteen seconds. Gone to the next level up before the deposit even clears.
We’re all playing hot potato with government crumbs.
The public thinks we’re rolling in subsidies and destroying the earth.
Meanwhile, we’re just sitting at the kitchen table doing math, wondering if it’s worth the gamble to let the health insurance lapse one more month to stay afloat.
The villain in the headlines is the guy who skips the doctor's appointment to keep the kids fed.
We’re all just gears in something too big to stop.
I don’t have a fix. I don’t even know if there is one.
I sat down this week to take a good look at our farm’s 2025 numbers.
Super lean operation.
Best wheat we ever grew.
Best beets.
Corn and beans took a drubbing.
Averaged out to a damn good year on paper. Barely made enough to buy a box of Twinkies and some gummy bears.
Big year.
And in February, they’ll send a check so we can do it all again.
Yep! It was a bank bailout, not a farmer bailout as I mentioned in my post this week. What a friggin' fraud.
Such a cringeworthy statement of how the iron heel of corporate corruption has throttled and undermined agricultural practices. Indentured servants are serfs and slaves which are intended to keep people spinning around in the hamster wheel cages they’ve created. Unless and until people resist, demanding a new version of this business model, they’re doomed to be satisfied wearing the red and green hats of their oppressors.