Donald Trump has consistently highlighted that the European Union is blocking American agricultural exports or rendering them economically unviable. His administration echoes this with the USTR 2025 National Trade Estimate Report saying, regarding the EU, that “the United States is concerned that these measures may unnecessarily restrict trade without furthering safety objectives, because they appear to be applied beyond the extent necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life or health, not based on science, or maintained without sufficient scientific evidence.”
Protecting Farmers
Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy is more than a subsidy program; it is a deliberate “fortress.” In its latest 2023–2027 reform—updated again in November 2025—Brussels provides small and midsize farms with direct payments of up to 3,000 euros annually, one-time grants of up to 75,000 euros, and near-total exemptions from the environmental rules that bind larger operations. The stated goal is clear: preserve hundreds of thousands of family-sized farms as the backbone of rural Europe, even if it means shielding them from cheaper imports—sometimes even from other EU nations.
Trump says he’s protecting American farmers, too. According to the USDA’s latest count, 86 percent of America’s 1.9 million farms are small family operations, yet they produce only 17 percent of the nation’s agricultural output and occupy just 41 percent of its farmland. Between 2017 and 2022, the United States lost 141,000 farms—almost all of them small. What remains is a radically consolidated system dominated by a few vertically integrated giants: Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and ADM. When Washington speaks of “farmers,” it may actually mean corporations. That’s an asymmetry at the heart of transatlantic food disputes.
In Europe, protecting farmers still means preserving a living rural society—one that often practices crop rotation, maintains hedgerows, and uses fewer chemical inputs precisely because subsidies and import protections give them room to do so.
Recent US–EU Trade Deal
This is the fractured landscape into which the new U.S.–EU trade agreement—finalized in late July 2025—has arrived.
The Turnberry agreement eliminates industrial tariffs and expands tariff-rate quotas for U.S. pork, dairy, almonds, sorghum, soybeans, and other commodities, while simplifying certification for products already meeting EU standards.
Crucially, all major EU food-safety bans remain in place: no hormone-treated beef, no ractopamine-fed pork, and no chlorine-washed chicken.
Large U.S. agribusinesses with scalable, EU-compliant lines—Tyson, Cargill, and major grain traders—are best positioned to capture most of the new export volume. Some mid-sized U.S. producers focused on hormone-free, ractopamine-free, or certified organic products may also benefit, though on a smaller scale.
For Europe’s small and medium-sized farmers—already under pressure—increased import volumes bring more competition, despite the preserved bans.
Conclusion
Both sides say they are defending “their farmers.” They are. They just mean different things by the word.
One side is fighting to preserve a rural civilization built on human-scale holdings and ecological flexibility. The other is fighting to expand a global industrial machine that left the family farm behind generations ago.
What appears to be a dispute over hormones and chlorine is also a clash between two fundamentally different visions. And there’s a further irony beneath it all. What was once simply food—crops grown on smaller plots, livestock raised on mixed pastures, soil tended with rotation and patience—has now become a premium category with premium pricing.
The “old way” has followed the pattern of many other domains: horseback riding becomes a luxury after cars dominate; mechanical watches become collectible art after quartz makes precision cheap.
But unlike watches or horses, the object here is biologically unavoidable. We eat these products. They become our bodies, our health spans, and our medical risk profiles.
And so the dilemma sharpens: In an economy built for mass throughput, can the world be fed in the old way, or must it remain a lifestyle boutique for the wealthy?
This isn’t just nostalgia versus modernity—it’s a question of whether the most life-supporting forms of agriculture can survive outside niche pricing in a system optimized for volume rather than vitality.