I’m a farmer in Ohio. Trump’s tariffs are devastating.

American farmers deserve better.

By Chris Gibbs

I'm a family farmer in western Ohio, where we own and operate 560 acres of corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay. We also have 90 head of beef cattle. Basically, I’m the kind of person Trump was talking about when he promised to “protect our farmers.”

From spending a lifetime in this business, I can tell you that people like me crave one thing more than anything else: stability. In order to be able to function season to season, family farmers need to know that the business conditions we are operating in will remain more or less the same over time.

Trump has a radically different approach. He calls it “strategic uncertainty.” He lurches from one policy to another, so that you have no idea what the business climate is going to be like on any given day. The way I look at it, that’s just another way of saying you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. 

Here’s what “strategic uncertainty” looks like for real people like me: Trump’s tariffs, and the trade war they created, have been absolutely destructive to our business, and others across the Midwest and across the country. 

Here’s how tariffs work: They make goods and services more expensive upon entry to the U.S. And American businesses and consumers are the ones who ultimately pay that cost—not foreign countries. Making things worse, other countries apply retaliatory tariffs, which make it harder for people like me to sell our goods abroad, and the cycle continues.

That takes money directly out of farmers’ pockets. And farmers don’t sit on their money—we move it all throughout the local economy. We buy heavy machinery, and keep it maintained over time using local service providers. We buy feed and fertilizer and other raw materials that are essential for our work. And as landowners, we pay large property taxes that fund schools and other essential services in our communities.

Over the course of decades, as global markets have opened up, American farmers have worked toward buying and selling their products around the world. That’s made us better off, made our country stronger, and created whole new industries along the way. And Donald Trump is now taking a pickaxe to that system that’s been built up over decades, one tariff at a time.

Something else you learn being a farmer is that the federal programs that Trump and Elon Musk like to bash are essential for many of us in rural America. There are thousands of local USDA service centers around the country, for example, that farmers and others have depended on for decades. For many, this is their only regular interaction with a federal employee, outside of a Post Office. 

I myself have been working with a local conservationist and engineer who was a federal employee. He knew my land, my contracts, and my business, and was working with me on some environmental modifications to my farm. Then, one day, he was abruptly fired by Musk and his DOGE marauders. 

No transition plan, no support—just fired. I don’t expect Musk’s agents ever knew what this person did, or cared. Now it’s up to me to pick up the pieces, with no additional support, and the fired engineer to find a new job. No plan in place from the DOGE crew, no comment from Musk or anyone else about why they saw fit to fire this person, no nothing. Just chaos, followed by silence.

In the coming weeks, I’m planning on planting my crop. For the first time in my 30-plus years in this business, I’m planting in an environment where I have no idea what’s coming next—because of the tariffs, because of the trade war, because of Donald Trump’s chaos. 

American farmers deserve better.

Chris Gibbs is a former Trump voter and farmer from Shelby County, OH. He used to be his county GOP Chair and is now the Democratic Chair. He is a participant in the Home of the Brave campaign.