Nebraska Ranchers Wrestle with Soaring Costs and Fraying Loyalty to Trump

Yvette Mannon was already having a difficult year when the wildfire came. In April, flames tore through 1,600 grazing acres and destroyed 13 miles of fencing on the Nebraska ranch she bought in 2002. Her 300 cattle survived, but the fences had to be replaced and the herd still needed feeding. With steel prices at their highest in years, largely because of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, that meant spending $4.89 a foot—a bill exceeding $300,000.

Worse was to follow. Because so much grazing land had been lost, Mannon needed a tractor out every day delivering hay, at a time when diesel prices, driven up by the Iran War, had risen by more than 40 per cent year on year. Then in August, the Trump administration announced it would import 300,000 metric tons of duty-free foreign beef in an effort to lower consumer prices. The news landed just before the September-to-November window when most American calves are weaned and sold. The cattle market tanked immediately.

"So we're 'Buy American', 'Let's Make America Great'," said Mannon, 63, who voted for Trump. "But for you guys over here, sorry." It felt, she said, like a betrayal.

Across the United States, farmers and ranchers say they are being squeezed from every direction. Recent years have brought drought, damaged crops and historically low cattle herds. Government policy, they argue, has made matters worse. In Nebraska, which backed Trump overwhelmingly at the last election, that pressure is prompting some to reassess their political loyalties. Dan Osborn, an independent candidate challenging the Trump-backed Republican Pete Ricketts, is performing surprisingly well in the polls ahead of November's Senate race.

Republicans appear keenly aware of the discord. Both Trump and Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen have announced relief measures in recent weeks aimed at lowering fuel costs for farmers and ranchers who say they have struggled for months. The Iran War has sent diesel and fertiliser prices soaring—both daily necessities for agricultural operations. Tariffs have pushed up machinery costs and repairs, as well as steel and lumber prices. And decisions by the administration, whether importing foreign beef or opening the southern border to Mexican cattle, have sent already-volatile markets into overdrive. Many producers are losing hundreds of dollars per head.

"All of this hit cattle markets, as a whole, negatively," said James Mitchell, an assistant professor and agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas. Cattle markets run in ten- to twelve-year cycles, he explained, with good years and bad. The industry recently enjoyed a particularly lucrative period, when low supply and high demand drove prices up. Now the market is clearly on a downswing.

Jake Wolfinger, 45, has been weathering the downturn at his feedlot near Lexington, Nebraska. He and his wife, both Ohio natives from multi-generational farming families, moved to Nebraska—drawn by lush land and the most groundwater in the nation—to strike out on their own. They bought a dilapidated feedlot in 2010 and have turned it into a sophisticated operation with 5,500 cattle. Neighbours point to them as proof that hard work still counts in a tough industry. But Wolfinger did not factor the Iran War, tariffs or foreign beef imports into his planning. "Things were just chumming along pretty good," he said. He was selling cattle for $240 per hundredweight; that has dropped to $225. The difference may seem small, but it means a loss of potentially hundreds of dollars a head. Diesel costs are punishing too, with some equipment going through 400-gallon tanks a day. "It really makes a guy think," he said.

A Trump supporter who backed the president because "we needed his spirit in this country", Wolfinger also voiced frustration with what he called "woke DEI" policies on the left. But he is unhappy with the president's intervention in the beef market. "People need to stay the hell out of farmers' business, because it's harvest time," he said.

Forty miles north-west, near Callaway, 54-year-old Duane Kimball stands in his shed surrounded by machinery—and a huge Trump banner along one wall. "The daily upcharge… is kind of painful," he said. "I know a lot of people have had to go back to their banks and increase their lines of credit." Kimball believed the Iran War would have ended long ago, but he does not blame Trump for all his economic challenges. "To pin that on this administration, I don't think is a fair assessment," he said, pointing to cumbersome regulations and the rising cost of machinery and fertiliser—trends that began before Trump returned to the White House.

Mannon, who returned to her native Nebraska and bought the ranch after a career in banking, believes the agricultural industry will show its feelings at the midterms. Like many around here, she prefers not to engage in too much political debate. That is not a problem for her friend and nearby rancher Jim Jenkins. A former independent senatorial candidate, Jenkins is fiercely proud of Nebraska agriculture and of his own ranch, on land his family homesteaded more than 150 years ago. So incensed has he been by policies he feels are harming the state's agricultural industry that he wrote an opinion article over the summer in an Omaha newspaper.

He has felt the squeeze personally, citing high diesel, fertiliser, lumber and steel costs—everything from barbed wire to fence posts. That has been compounded by uncertainty over what may happen next, and what the next Trump announcement might mean for the industry. "Those are the things that keep you up at night," the 69-year-old told BBC News. An outspoken Trump critic who has never voted for him, Jenkins knows he is an outlier among his conservative neighbours. When Trump was first elected, Jenkins hoped he would prove "to be a practical business guy". Now, he said, "I think he's been anything but practical".

For many Trump-supporting farmers and ranchers, however, the president's decisions—even when they hit them economically—deserve the benefit of the doubt. "We've all known this about Trump. He just kind of could be a little 'shoot, fire, aim'," Wolfinger said. "I wish you could, you know, put the gun back and holster it and then think about it." Even so, he added, "I think he's, for the most part, trying to run this country in the right direction".

Don Cantrell, whose grandfather started farming family land that now stretches to 12,000 acres, said he is still getting hit on diesel and admits the president "does some stupid things" and "says some stupid things". But Cantrell believes Trump has been the "best president overall". His establishment of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, was exactly what he felt the country needed. "Let's cut government waste," he said. "There's so much waste." Trump also maintains stances on social issues—abortion, and his praise of Christianity—that align with many Nebraskan voters' personal convictions. "I think, in general, if you're conservative in this country, you're going to vote conservative," Wolfinger said. Don Batie, 67, agrees: "There's a lot of other issues besides agriculture."

Still, the economic realities are hard to ignore. Batie retired from farming last year for a combination of personal and economic reasons. The corn and soybean farmer watched prices fall from $7 a bushel for corn in early 2022 to just $4.29 three years later. Costs have not come down, he said, with tariffs and inflation eating into his bottom line. As a result, he has abandoned his longtime dream of passing on the 400-acre farm he owns to his daughter. "It just wasn't going to work now," he said, sitting at the dining room table in the home he grew up in. He reached that conclusion only within the past year, after crunching the numbers. "I knew things hadn't been good," he said. "But when I started working on the numbers… I was like, 'This is going to be bad.'" Batie voted for Trump in 2016 and again in the primary—but not in 2024, disappointed with his policies. He has heard similar dissatisfaction throughout the state. "They're still strong Republicans," he said of those people. "But they're not a Trump supporter any more."

All over Nebraska, however, the industry soldiers on. On a rainy Thursday in Broken Bow, buyers clad in cowboy hats, plaid shirts and denim gathered for the regular indoor cattle auction. Calves still need to be bought and sold, and ranch operations—many multi-generational—do not pause for politics. Across the train tracks, past feed and hardware stores, Yvette Mannon summed up Nebraskans' resilience. "People in agriculture are eternal optimists," she said. "Otherwise we wouldn't get in it."