Cindy Hyde-Smith’s record on agriculture: Fighting for farmers or furthering Trump’s agenda even when it hurts them?
Despite the severe economic fallout from both the 2018 and 2025 tariff wars with China, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi has remained steadfast in her loyalty to President Donald Trump’s trade agenda—even as it has devastated farmers in the state that she represents and across the country.
“We talk about the T-word here and you know it is used as a tool and I think that it’s been used pretty wisely,” Hyde-Smith told SuperTalk Mississippi during a Sept. 26, 2025, interview, referring to the president’s tariffs. “In the long run, I really think we’re going to be better off. But it’s been very hurtful in certain areas, too, and I understand that.”
The question facing beleaguered farmers is whether understanding the crisis they face equates to doing something meaningful about it.
Hyde-Smith, 66, who served six years as Mississippi’s agriculture commissioner before being appointed and then elected to the U.S. Senate in 2018, has repeated versions of the “long run” argument for years. Back in September 2018, she assured farmers gathered in Greenwood, Mississippi that once that year’s tariffs ran their course, they would be able to “make a living on a level playing field.”
The promised payoff never came. By the time Washington and Beijing signed a trade truce in January 2020, U.S. agricultural exports to China had fallen by between $27 billion and $30 billion. Farm bankruptcies reached a 15-year high. Crop prices collapsed. Tens of millions of pounds of produce rotted unsold in silos and fields. Mississippi alone saw $270 million in lost profits from soybeans and cotton, two of its most vital crops. Soybean growers, who had relied on China as their top export market, absorbed the worst of the blow, accounting for more than 70 percent of all lost agricultural revenue nationwide, according to a CATO Institute analysis.
In response to the tariffs, China sourced produce from Brazil and other countries instead, a practice the country has continued since. China is the world’s largest importer of soybeans, which it primarily uses as animal feed, while Brazil is the biggest exporter. The result of China’s turn to Brazil is that American farmers’ market loss became entrenched.
The federal government tried to cushion the losses with $28 billion in emergency aid, but the financial strain ran deeper than subsidies could patch. Farm debt hit record highs, the suicide rate among farmers rose, and half the bailout money went to the largest, wealthiest farms, according to an analysis by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The 2025 tariffs are expected to be even more punishing because inflation has dramatically increased farming overhead while commodity prices have plummeted by 40 percent since 2022.
“We have an example of what happened in the past, and it’s a very similar situation, except the farm economy at that time was much stronger than it is now,” Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association and a Kentucky farmer, told Politico in April. “We don’t have any margin for error... We’re going to lose a generation of young farmers.”
In May, China completely stopped buying U.S. soybeans and corn. Overall, agricultural exports to China were down 53 percent in the first seven months of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Trump also curtailed the Food for Peace program, which had purchased roughly $2 billion worth of surplus commodities annually for distribution in poorer countries. Its elimination further narrowed outlets for American crops.
An economic analysis by Yale University noted that nearly all meaningful economic indicators will fall between now and 2035 because of the tariffs. Consumer prices are expected to increase while household incomes shrink, slowing overall growth. With an average effective tariff rate of 17.7 percent, real GDP is projected to be 0.4 percent smaller during the next decade, equal to a $125 billion annual loss, while unemployment is expected to rise by 0.7 percentage points and payroll employment to fall by more than half a million. Manufacturing is expected to see a modest boost, but to be outweighed by declines in construction and agriculture, leaving the overall economy weaker and households poorer.
For farmers, all of these indicators are made more troubling by the possibility that China will not buy U.S. soybeans in the future even if a trade deal is reached, according to a Politico report.
Yet Sen. Hyde-Smith has continued to downplay the tariffs. In April, she likened the tariffs to “cleaning out that closet,” telling a Mississippi radio host: “You got a mess before it gets better. And we’re in the mess.”
This was in striking contrast to her words on the Senate floor just five months earlier, when she warned colleagues that the farm economy “is headed in a dark and scary direction” and that conditions were “looking more like the farm crisis of the 1980s every day.” She listed inflation, high interest rates, low farm income, declining exports and inadequate federal price supports as the chief causes—and then posed her colleagues a question: “Are we going to learn from lessons of the past and take appropriate action?”
Hyde-Smith did not respond to questions from The Mississippi Independent about the tariffs. In response to queries about that and other agricultural issues, her media office offered only a link to the SuperTalk radio interview.
A record of contradictions
The tension between Hyde-Smith’s warnings of crisis and her loyalty to Trump’s polarizing policies defines much of her congressional record, though her resume in some ways supports her contention that she’s a farm champion. She and her husband run a cattle ranch, and she chaired the agriculture committee in the Mississippi Senate. She spent six years as the state’s agriculture commissioner, and now serves on the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee.
In other ways, Hyde-Smith’s record reveals contradictions. Independent legislation tracker Govtrack.us consistently ranks her near the bottom of the Senate in terms of productivity, with few bills advancing and almost none becoming law during her seven years in the Senate. Her legislative wins during the period covered were sparse: a post office renaming in 2019 and an appropriations bill that was later enacted in another bill, also in 2019. She had not introduced any other bills than have become law. Hyde-Smith did cosponsor a bill to protect cattle farmers from dealers who default.
Hyde-Smith has offered some bills with farming and rural relevance during the most recent congressional session. She has authored legislation to boost U.S. cotton sales and reestablish emergency services at rural hospitals, and has cosponsored the FARMER Act to strengthen crop insurance, and the Meat Packing Special Investigator Act targeting the four corporations—Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef—that dominate the beef and poultry markets.
Her previous record on agriculture often tilted toward cattle farmers. She was also linked to one of the state’s most notorious boondoggles: the Mississippi Beef Processors plant, which collapsed three months after opening in 2004, costing at least $55 million and eliminating hundreds of jobs. Hyde-Smith later said she had supported the project based on “facts that turned out not to be facts,” according to a July 5, 2017, article in Mississippi Today.
In 2016, she co-chaired Trump’s agricultural advisory committee and, at the invitation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was invited to participate in a trade mission to China. In 2017, she applauded efforts by Trump and congressional leaders to change tax structures in ways that she said would benefit agribusiness and farmers. By the time Hyde-Smith entered the U.S. Senate in 2018, she had fully embraced Trump’s brand of MAGA politics. A Democrat during her early political career, she switched parties in 2010, campaigned alongside Confederate imagery and tweeted that “Mississippi doesn’t need liberals” when U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont visited the state. In Washington D.C., she aligned herself tightly with Trump’s agenda, including on tariffs.
She avoids breaking ranks with the Trump agenda, including, in April 2025, when she voted against a Senate resolution that would have ended the global tariff war. Though her record shows a “yes” vote, it was a procedural motion to table the measure—effectively killing it, according to VoteSmart. Yet in August, she acknowledged that the agricultural trade balance had swung from a surplus to a projected $49 billion deficit because of the tariffs. For Mississippi, where soybeans and corn form a $2.1 billion backbone of the farm economy, the consequences of losing China as a buyer are dire: collapsing prices, unsold crops and farmers edging closer to insolvency.
“I’m not sure if I’ll survive this one,” Mississippi Delta farmer Ray Crawford told The Mississippi Independent in September. Crawford, who is politically conservative, said he was considering selling equipment to stay afloat. He largely blamed the tariffs and inflation for his financial travails.
Heading into the 2026 midterms, Hyde-Smith has been cast by her supporters as a “warrior for farmers,” and she insists that she remains the best person in Congress to defend agricultural interests. “You bet I’m the one that you want to send in to defend this and to come out with results,” she said in the SuperTalk Mississippi interview, referring to government subsidies that would help farmers weather tariff hardships.
As the U.S. and China set a Nov. 10, 2025, deadline to agree on a new trade agreement, the situation on the ground continues to worsen. Last week, the Trump administration announced $20 billion in financial assistance for Argentina, which responded by slashing its export taxes on soybeans and other products. Within 24 hours, China doubled its soybean purchases from Argentina, further undermining U.S. growers.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who represents one of the country’s largest farm states, voiced his frustration publicly. “Farmers VERY upset abt Argentina selling soybeans to China right after USA bail out,” he wrote on X. “Still ZERO USA soybeans sold to China. Meanwhile China is still hitting USA w 20% retaliatory tariff. NEED CHINA TRADE DEAL NOW.”
Meanwhile, Trump has suggested another bailout may be necessary, an implicit admission that tariffs have failed to restore agricultural competitiveness. His administration has floated paying for the farm aid using revenue raised from other tariffs.
The Farm Bill that isn’t
The timing could hardly be worse. The federal Farm Bill, traditionally the centerpiece of U.S. agricultural policy, expired in 2023 and has since been extended twice. Few analysts expect a new bill to pass this year. In its place, much of what would normally appear in the Farm Bill, including nutrition assistance, crop insurance, commodity pricing and disaster aid, was folded into the Trump-backed Big Beautiful Bill Act. Hyde-Smith celebrated the measure as a lifeline for farmers. Yet whatever benefit the bill might provide has been negated by tariffs that continue to shut Mississippi growers out of their most important markets.
Farmers meanwhile face other perils as a result of the federal government shutdown, which has just begun. Depending on how long the shutdown lasts, the USDA will halt the issuance of new farm loans and curtail operations of the Farm Service Agency, and commodity data reports will cease to be issued.
On Sept. 30, 2025, the New York Times reported: “Hours before a midnight deadline, the Senate rejected a Republican bill to extend federal funding at current levels through Nov. 21 and avoid a government shutdown.” Senators voted mostly along party lines, falling short of the 60-vote threshold required to advance the measure. Hyde-Smith voted for the measure.
Image: Hyde-Smith at a Senate agriculture committee meeting (USDA photo, credit Preston Keres)