Appreciation and admiration describes how the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture feels about farmers and ranchers.
Stephen Vaden, a Union City, Tennessee, native, sees it at multiple levels. Vaden previously served as general counsel to the USDA during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Farming and ranching is an industry where the people involved in it have direct ties, Vaden said. They are able to see the fruits of their labor, and what they do is critical for the entire rest of the economy.
“It doesn’t matter how advanced the tech company you have, or whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, if you’re not eating nothing else matters,” Vaden said. “What’s the most amazing thing about our American farmers is that they are such a small slice of the population, and yet they feed not just this entire country, but substantial portions of the entire world and that depends on less than 2% of our population.”
Trade
Vaden said farmers and ranchers want markets that are fair and open. He said when Trump started about a year ago there had not been any meaningful trade negotiations the previous four years.
“We were starting from a dead stop,” he said, adding that put the Trump administration in a tough position, but he praised negotiators. “As we’ve gotten into the third and fourth quarter of this year, we now have wins on the board.”
While many people have been focused on China, and the Oct. 30 announcement that the Chinese would start buying U.S. soybeans and other commodities, he was also pleased to see other agreements with other southeast Asian partners including Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, plus Pakistan.
Another new market is in Uzbekistan, which is a country that produces cotton, but because of production declines, the U.S. is now selling cotton there.
The administration has pushed other trade agreements that represent new demand for American agricultural products, he said.
Vaden noted that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer negotiated other agreements in Southeast Asia and he has negotiated with Central and South American countries including Argentina. The agreements address not only tariff barriers, but trade barriers, he said. Some of the important barriers against American agricultural products are non-tariff barriers, most prominent among them the European Union’s long-standing effort to try to keep American products and companies out of its marketplace.
“That is a huge win, which allows our farmers to compete on an even playing field and prevent the European Union from boxing us out and preventing us from competing,” Vaden said.
He said for the first time in four years, an administration has a trade plan.
“One thing I can tell you is every time the president’s trade team talks to a country, ag is No. 1 on their agenda,” he said. “If you’re unwilling to cut a deal with us to grant our farmers more market access, you’re not really serious about trade and you’re not going to be able to cut a deal with the United States. That’s why each and every one of these agreements that you have seen announced has an ag component, and that’s not going to change.”
As an example, Vaden said China’s agreement to buy more soybeans, 12 million metric tons through the end of 2025 and 25 million metric tons from 2026 to 2028, is in the framework stage and that set the tone for expectations. He noted the Oct. 30 agreement also covers other ag products, too.
Greer is in the process of working through many details, Vaden said, adding it was important for farmers and ranchers to know what’s in the agreement.
“I expect that these framework agreements that have been announced will be formalized by the Trade Representative’s Office in a form that’s publicly digestible and is down on paper,” he said.
USMCA and other opportunities
In 2026, another focus will be on the Northern Hemisphere as United States, Mexico and Canada trade officials will all be looking at the agreement between their three countries, which started in 2020, and it is up for periodic review to see if there are elements of that agreement that can be improved upon.
“I was happy to see so many agricultural groups signed up to participate in a public hearing that Representative Greer is having as we get prepared to go through that legally required review,” Vaden said.
Also, the trade team, including the USDA, will be having several trade missions in 2026 with an additional focus on Asia and the Middle East to hopefully open markets.
The administration is eager to engage on trade discussions in countries like India and several other countries that have been closed to American producers for decades.
Inputs and cost squeeze
President Trump has signed several executive orders, including one in early December to look closer at the cost of production in agriculture. “We are concerned about this deeply,” Vaden said.
The Department of Justice, under the leadership of Attorney General Pam Bondi, has a task force to help study and investigate farmers’ concerns.
“We’re asking commodity groups and individual farmers to share with us examples of anti- competitive conduct they have seen that are leading to increased costs of production for them,
those primary focus areas have been laid out,” he said. “There’s been a lot of focus on the meat packers, but it’s important not to forget that for row crop farmers, fertilizer, equipment manufacturers, seed, and chemicals have all seen a dramatic rise in prices.”
In several sectors, there is concern about what he termed was extreme market concentration with few competitors and that can lead to an unchecked run up in prices.
The USDA’s role will be to help obtain as much information and data and share it with the Department of Justice and that entity will decide any course of action, Vaden said.
Livestock markets
The livestock market is the bright spot in the current ag economy, Vaden said. USDA wants to continue to see ranchers do well, Vaden said. A healthy supply chain should have every sector making a profit while the consumer is paying a price that he or she can afford to pay for a product he or she wants.
“That’s got to be our focus,” he said.
There’s been a lot of discussion of beef prices for an understandable reason, he said.
“There has been a pendulum swing of gargantuan proportions,” Vaden said. “Three years ago, if we were having this conversation, we’d be talking about farmers losing money and packers making money hand over fist. Now, of course, the cycle has swung, and it’s a completely opposite situation.”
Today large companies are losing hundreds of millions of dollars and some grocery stores are stopping some of the price increase from being passed along to the consumer, Vaden said, but it is the packers that are taking the brunt of that right now and being forced to absorb some losses.
“Over the longer term, what we need is a larger domestic beef herd than what we have now,” Vaden said, adding that USDA is using its resources to jumpstart it.
“Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has announced a multi-point plan to help get us there by working with our colleagues at the Interior Department to see that as much public grazing land is made available to cattlemen as possible so that we’re not standing in the way of increasing the herd size,” Vaden said. “But we also need to find a way to more properly manage our livestock sector so that we don’t have these extreme shifts in the pendulum where we go from one boom-bust to another, depending on which side of the supply chain you were on. That’s not positive.”
Lessening those extremes is the No. 1 step to rebuilding the herd to an acceptable level and continues to meet strong American demand, he said.
Farm bill
Vaden said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was approved in July 2025, contains many provisions that farmers have been seeking, including updated reference prices that reflect the actual cost of production and a producer-friendly options on Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage for the upcoming crop year.
Other provisions provide tax certainty that helps farmers and ranchers to keep the operation in place for the next generation, he said. “There’s no exploding time clock that our farmers and ranchers have to worry about.”
However, while OBBBA addressed much of what farmers and ranchers have come to expect in a farm bill, it does not diminish the importance of the farm bill, Vaden said. Because of Senate rules, some matters could not be taken care of in reconciliation.
“We’re happy to provide whatever technical assistance, expertise and data Congress needs when it begins working on a new farm bill in order to see to it that they can put the best provisions forward.”
Tariffs
President Trump’s tariff policy did create early pain in the first half of 2025, but it was the right action to get other countries to understand that trade must also benefit the United States, Vaden said.
“What you are seeing are the fruits of the trade policy,” Vaden said. “We are able to make these revisions because the president’s tariffs brought our market participants to the table and we’ve been able to reach deals and the frameworks having been announced.”
Agriculture in particular will benefit from expanded trade and removing tariffs that are tied to inputs, like fertilizer, will help provide relief for the upcoming crop season, he said.
“You’ll see further recalibration,” Vaden said.
Dave Bergmeier can be reached at 620-227-1822 or [email protected].
