President Trump will participate in a farmer roundtable in Wisconsin on Friday as he seeks to keep one of his core blocs in place ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Mr. Trump will visit Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on Friday afternoon. Few details about the event or the president’s trip have been made available. It will be Mr. Trump’s first visit to Wisconsin, a swing state where he eked out a narrow victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
The roundtable comes just weeks after Mr. Trump visited China and struck a deal in which Beijing committed to buy at least $17 billion in U.S. agriculture products, including beef imports, over the next three years. However, Beijing had not confirmed the deal.
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump announced the federal government will guarantee loans for food suppliers and farmers in a move to boost an American agriculture industry battered by the Iran war, tariffs and other market shocks.
The loan guarantees will cover vegetable and grain seed farmers; cattle, pig, poultry and egg producers; and grocery wholesalers, the White House said Friday.
Mr. Trump also said he would allow higher-ethanol gasoline, known as E15, to be sold throughout the year, a move that provides a boost to the agricultural industry because it contains 15% corn-based ethanol.
American farmers have overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump. In 2024, he won 444 counties across the country labeled as farm-dependent by 78%.
Growers were walloped by Biden-era inflation before Mr. Trump made tariffs a central plank of his second term, raising the cost of imported materials such as fertilizer and steel for tractors and machinery.
Now the Iran war threatens additional economic damage.
The American Farm Bureau Federation and dozens of other producer groups sounded the alarm in an April letter to Mr. Trump.
They said a series of weather challenges, economic pressure and geopolitical shocks posed real challenges for rural America.
“As planting season began in earnest across much of the U.S., the closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent fuel and fertilizer prices skyrocketing — further straining a farm economy that already had its back against the wall due to record inflation, trade uncertainty, rapidly declining crop prices and catastrophic natural disasters,” the groups said.
The coalition asked Mr. Trump to consider a new round of farmer relief in the defense supplemental funding package he sent to Congress in recent weeks.
“Without timely assistance, continued losses risk accelerating farm closures, reducing domestic production capacity and weakening the ability of farmers and ranchers across this great nation to provide food, clothes and fuel for the American people,” the letter said.
