While record rainfall made it difficult to plant corn and soybeans until long after the typical growing window had passed, President Trump’s long-running trade war cut off farmers’ access to China’s enormous market and commodity prices remained in the doldrums, the Agriculture Department estimates that 2019 was farmers’ most profitable in five years. The estimate is a result of the Market Facilitation Program, or the government's farm bailout, the Washington Post reported. Without government assistance, U.S. farm income would have fallen about $5 billion from its already-low 2018 level. So the $14.5 billion in bailout funding announced so far represents a substantial reversal of fortune. About three-quarters of the funding already has been distributed. “If you look at the prices, the weather and the trade imbalances, you’d expect the farm sector to be in a terrible spot,” Montana State University economist Eric Belasco said. "It’s not.” Most farmers benefited from the bailout, Belasco said, but because bailout money is distributed based on acreage and not farmer’s need, about half of the money (47 percent) went to the largest 10 percent of operations. According to 2018 data, more than 70 percent of farm households had a high level of financial risk in 2018. But of those that qualify as very large (median income $756,000), only 25 percent fit into that same category.
