In his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Trump painted a picture of economic resurgence. The U.S. economy, he declared, is booming. Inflation has been defeated. Investment is pouring back into the country. His administration, he said, has delivered the fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in American history.

For the global financiers, executives, and investors gathered in the Alps, the message was clear. Capital is winning again.

But that story collapses when viewed from farm coWhat Trump celebrated in Davos was an economy measured almost entirely through the lens of high finance. Asset values. Financial inflows. Market confidence. Investment velocity. Corporate and brand expansion. These are the indicators that matter in global economic forums. They are also the indicators that bypass the lived economy of farmers.

A farm economy is not measured by capital velocity. It is measured by input costs versus crop value, soil fertility over time, access to affordable credit, resilience to droughts and floods, seed sovereignty, and what remains after debt service is paid and another season has been survived.

By those measures, American agriculture is not booming. It is breaking.

This is the structural contradiction at the heart of the current economic narrative. Capital is increasingly mobile, global, and abstract, while farming is land bound, biologically constrained, and increasingly dependent on inputs controlled and price manipulated by a handful of multinational corporations.

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in modern agriculture’s reliance on genetically engineered seed and chemical inputs.

The Chemical Dependency Trap

Reliance on GMO seed and the herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that accompany it has quietly but decisively pushed farmers into a trap. What was sold as efficiency has become dependency. Seeds are patented, expensive, and must be repurchased annually. They are bundled with chemical regimes that grow more intensive as soils degrade and pests develop resistance.

Each season, farmers face higher upfront costs simply to stay in production. Margins shrink. Debt grows. And the land itself begins to fail.

This is not innovation. It is extractive agriculture dressed up as progress.

As soil biology is destroyed, organic matter declines, water retention collapses, and resilience to drought and flooding disappears. Farmers are forced to apply more inputs to compensate for declining soil health, locking them into a vicious cycle of rising costs and diminishing returns. What appears productive on a balance sheet is, in reality, biological liquidation; the destruction of the very systems of life which support the growing of crops and rural economies.

Corporate profits rise. Input sales grow. GDP appears to be healthy, but farm balance sheets collapse as the ecological health of the farm unravels.

At the same moment high finance was being toasted in Davos, the administration’s earlier intervention through the Department of Justice on behalf of Monsanto gained renewed force, as the Supreme Court agreed last week to take up the glyphosate case the administration urged it to hear, placing the weight of the U.S. government behind a foreign multinational corporation against chemically injured Americans, many of them farmers and farm workers.

Law, Power, and the Final Externalization of Risk

The collapse facing farm families and rural communities is not unfolding in a legal vacuum. Thumbs are very heavily weighted on the scales of Lady Justice.

The Supreme Court’s decision to take up the glyphosate case, following the administration’s earlier urging through the Department of Justice, marks a decisive moment. If chemical manufacturers are shielded from accountability, risk does not disappear. It is displaced, into farm families’ bodies, into rural water systems, into public health budgets, and into the land itself.

This moment matters because it clarifies where power is aligning. When courts and regulators move to protect chemical corporations from consequence, they entrench the very system driving farm bankruptcy, ecological degradation, and rising illness. They tell farmers there is no recourse. They tell rural communities the damage is theirs to live with.

For a movement that claims to stand for health, this is a defining test. There is no path to making America healthy again while insulating the sources of harm from responsibility.

An economy that celebrates capital accumulation on the global stage, subsidizes chemical dependency at home, and shields its architects from accountability is not merely unstable. It is unjust.

Inflation Defeated, Except Where It Matters

Trump’s claim that inflation has been defeated rings hollow in agriculture.

Farmers continue to face relentless cost inflation. Seed prices driven upward by consolidation and intellectual property control, chemical inputs rising as resistance forces higher application rates, equipment costs remaining elevated, insurance premiums increasing, and interest rates making operating loans more expensive and more precarious.

For farmers, inflation has not disappeared. It has been displaced. Absorbed quietly through debt, land loss, and bankruptcy.

What emerges is a two speed economy.

At the top, wealth grows through licensing deals, branding, ventures, and global finance. Capital moves freely across borders. Risk is diversified and externalized.

At the base, farmers shoulder ecological risk, climate volatility, and market instability. The land absorbs chemicals. The soil dies. Risks rise as resilience fails and the farm becomes unworkable. Farm families absorb financial collapse and deteriorating health. Suicide rates are rising, and ever increasing chemical exposure is taking a measurable toll on bodies and lives.

Rural communities absorb the social and psychological fallout and the hidden costs, polluted water, poisoned land, and long term public health damage.

These are predictable systemic outcomes, not of individual farm failure, but of a system of policies that value and reward financial extraction over land, families and communities. Therefore, this situation CAN be systemically remedied with policy and financial reform.

Policy as an Accelerator of Dept and Collapse

This suffering is not accidental. It is the result of policy choices.

Federal programs continue to subsidize chemical intensive systems through crop insurance structures, commodity programs, and regulatory frameworks that shield agrochemical manufacturers from liability. Farmers are locked into production models that degrade land and health while being told there are no viable alternatives supported at scale.

This is why bankruptcy rates rise even in years of high yields. This is why mental health crises deepen in so called good seasons. This is why rural America hollows out while agribusiness consolidates upward.

An economy that claims strength while destroying its soil, indebting its farmers, and externalizing health costs onto rural communities is not strong. It is unstable.

These crises are not inevitable. They result from political and financial policy values and choices, and different choices are available.

Policy and business must begin to value the nutrient density and cleanliness of food over production volume, rewarding quality and health rather than maximizing output at any cost.

Policy as an Accelerator of Prosperity

Stop underwriting chemical dependency, start underwriting transition: Federal farm policy must stop subsidizing systems that require escalating chemical use to remain viable. Crop insurance, commodity programs, and research dollars should reward soil health, biological resilience, and reduced input dependence.

Restore accountability: No company whose products contaminate land, water, or human bodies should be protected from liability by regulatory or judicial maneuvering. Accountability is pro farmer, pro family, and pro health.

Support real transitions, not talking points: Farmers need viable, well funded pathways to regenerative organic systems that lower costs, rebuild soil, and restore independence. That means technical assistance, transition finance, fair markets, and procurement policies that reward stewardship.

True cost accounting and antitrust: Polluted water, chronic illness, mental health crises, and rural hollowing are real costs that have been systematically shifted off corporate balance sheets and onto farm families, rural communities, and taxpayers. This distortion masks failure as success and allows monopolistic systems to thrive while independent producers collapse.

True cost accounting is pro market. It is essential to restoring honest competition and preventing the concentration of power that undermines both capitalism and democracy.

Farmers are the canaries in the coal mine of this system. When those closest to the land, to food production essential to all life, and to risk can no longer survive, it signals not individual failure but systemic imbalance. Ignoring these signals does not protect the economy. It accelerates collapse.

Redefine prosperity and reform the debt based monetary system that drives extraction: The way money is created shapes the entire economy. Today, most money enters circulation as interest bearing debt, which creates constant pressure for growth, consolidation, and extraction in order to service that debt. This dynamic rewards scale over resilience, speculation over production, and short term returns over long term stewardship.

In agriculture, the consequences are clear. Farmers are pushed to borrow more each year to pay for land, seed, chemicals, equipment, and operating costs. As debt loads rise, margins shrink and independence disappears. Ecological harm, consolidation, and bankruptcy are not anomalies in this system. They are predictable outcomes of a financial architecture that requires perpetual expansion to remain solvent.

This debt based money system is a central driver of social and ecological damage across the economy, from degraded land and polluted water to hollowed out rural communities and rising inequality. Addressing agricultural collapse without addressing the financial system that governs credit, risk, and investment will not resolve the underlying problem.

A more durable economy requires monetary reform that supports productive activity rather than rent extraction, and investment in real value rather than asset inflation. I have explored this in more detail in my article, Breaking the Debt Chains: Exposing the Root Cause of Social and Ecological Destruction, which examines how debt based money shapes policy incentives and concentrates power.

True prosperity should be measured by the health of land, the viability of food producers, the stability of communities, and the ability of future generations to live without inheriting unpayable debt. Reforming agriculture and reforming the monetary system must proceed together if markets are to function honestly and communities are to endure.

Farm families and rural communities have carried the burden long enough.
The question now is whether policy will continue to protect power or finally begin to protect life.