Last year, Alabama state Representative Thomas Jackson took a trip to the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Georgia—the largest ag expo in the Southeast and one of the largest in America—to get a better understanding of the economics of farming.
Over the course of a couple of days, Jackson talked with farmers and industry experts, got the prices of farm equipment and learned about the various costs associated with America’s most important industry. What he found was both enlightening and incredibly frustrating.
Essentially, it was this: Small farmers—the folks we make commercials about and put into campaign ads—are operating on a razor-thin profit margin, and they’re being squeezed from every direction.
“These people are the lifeblood of the country,” Jackson said recently, during an appearance on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast. “And they’re struggling. They need help. They’ve been destroyed by these tariffs, but they were hurting even before that.”
Jackson came back to Alabama and decided to do something. Last week, he filed HB523, a bill that would establish the Alabama Agricultural Enhancement Program.
That program, if the bill passes, would be implemented by the Commissioner of Ag and Industries and provide vital financial assistance to qualifying farmers to help them purchase equipment and supplies through a cost-sharing program. It mimics legislation passed in other states, such as Tennessee, where similar programs are wildly popular and wildly successful.
The Tennessee program, for example, has grown each year since its 2005 introduction and has been credited with more than $300 million in direct economic impact on the state’s farms. That includes nearly $200 million in additional row crop yields in that time.
That program has funded more than 80,000 projects in the state and is credited with saving hundreds of farms that would have otherwise gone bankrupt or been sold off to larger corporations or developers.
Basically, it works like this: Applicant farmers will be required to meet certain criteria, such as completing educational courses or training, and agree to utilize the equipment or supplies purchased with program funds in specific fields designated by the program administrators. That will allow state officials to direct resources towards more in-demand crops and utilize more modern farming methods to produce higher yields and better profits.
All of which lifts the small farmer out of the farming/bankruptcy purgatory that is dogging so many farmers.
“These folks are struggling, because the costs are stacked against them and if one little thing goes wrong on that machinery they have to buy, they’re busted,” Jackson said. “That’s one of the things I saw in Georgia—just how expensive it all is.”
It is yet another initiative pushed by Democrats that is targeted to help struggling farmers in the Age of Trump, where idiotic tariffs and whiplash negotiations with foreign governments have left prices bouncing up and down and farmers unsure if they’re just barely getting by or going under completely. Many have gone under.
So many, in fact, that Trump is once again being forced to push through a farm bailout package—this one costing taxpayers more than $12 billion—and still America is projected to lose a record number of farmers in the coming years.
Republicans, in the meantime, appear unwilling to challenge Trump on the harmful tariffs, and they seem incapable of drafting legislation that truly helps farmers in the long term.
Democrats have stepped into that void, although you wouldn’t know it by the votes in farm country, where Republicans are still dominating for some reason. Despite Alabama’s soy bean farmers facing near certain catastrophe and cattle farms getting shafted in favor of Argentinian farmers, the Alabama Farmers Federation, a couple of months ago, released its list of endorsements for the 2026 election cycle.
It was Republican from top to bottom.
Oddly, if asked to list the politicians who have hurt farmers the most, the list would have been the same.
Jackson, and his seven Democratic co-sponsors on the legislation, would like to see that change. They would like to think that eventually, if they keep proving to farmers and other working class Alabamians that there’s only one group of lawmakers truly addressing real issues and helping them fight real problems, that it will be enough to overcome the culture war foolishness.
That it will finally result in everyday Alabamians taking a look around and realizing that this place has been controlled by a supermajority of Republicans for 15 years now, and they own a lot of problems.
Maybe it’s time to vote for some people who are trying to solve them.
