The Scarecrow Survived: What Reagan Got Right About the American Farmers

The American family farm did not disappear. It adapted, modernized, and became one of the world’s most productive enterprises.

I grew up hearing people talk about the American farmer like he was always one bad harvest away from losing everything.

Spend enough time listening to John Mellencamp’s Rain on the Scarecrow, and you can understand why. The song captured something very real about the 1980s. Farm auctions were real. Foreclosures were real. Families who had worked on the same ground for generations really did lose it.

But that is not the whole story of American agriculture.

My grandfather has a roughly 2,000-acre dairy and ag farm in rural Illinois, outside Springfield. I spent summers there, and one thing you learn quickly on a farm is that nostalgia does not plant corn.

Farming is a business.

A difficult business, certainly. Weather does not care about your balance sheet. Corn prices do not care how hard you worked. Diesel, fertilizer, seed, equipment, and interest must all be paid before anybody knows what the harvest will bring.

But the American farmer today is far from Mellencamp’s scarecrow.

Reagan Bet on the Farmer

Ronald Reagan understood something important. Farmers did not need Washington making every decision for them. They needed markets, opportunity, reasonable taxes, and a government that stopped treating agriculture like a convenient political tool.

One of Reagan’s first major agricultural decisions was ending Jimmy Carter’s Soviet grain embargo in 1981.

The embargo had punished American farmers while accomplishing little. The Soviets bought grain somewhere else. Reagan said farmers had been unfairly singled out to carry the burden of foreign policy.

He was right.

Reagan’s broader goal was to move agriculture toward the market. The 1985 Food Security Act still contained substantial federal support, but Reagan pushed for planting and pricing decisions to respond more to customers and less to government storage programs.

That transition was not painless. The farm crisis of the 1980s was devastating. High debt, collapsing land values, and brutal interest rates wiped out farms.

We should never pretend otherwise.

But we should also look at what happened afterward.

Look at the American Farmer Today

Go onto a successful Illinois farm today, and you are looking at one of the most technologically sophisticated businesses in America.

The tractor may steer itself with GPS.

The farmer can monitor yields electronically, map soil conditions, track weather from a phone, change planting rates across the same field, and watch commodity prices in real time.

USDA estimates that American farm output has nearly tripled since 1948 while total inputs have increased only modestly.

That is an incredible American success story.

And contrary to the popular claim that corporations wiped out the family farmer, USDA reports that family farms still account for about 97 percent of American farms, 91 percent of farmland operated, and 85 percent of agricultural production value.

The family farm survived.

It just became a much more serious business.

Farmers Built Wealth Too

Another side of modern farming is missing from the old stereotype.

Farmland is valuable.

Very valuable.

USDA says American farm real estate averaged about $4,350 an acre in 2025, with farm real estate representing roughly $3.67 trillion in farm-sector assets.

For families who held onto good farmland through the difficult years, that land became a tremendous source of generational wealth.

That does not mean farmers are walking around with millions in cash. Farming can make someone asset-rich and cash-poor very quickly.

But it looks very different from the collapsing equity of 1985.

Farm households have changed too. Median farm-household income reached about $102,748 in 2024, higher than the median for all U.S. households. Large commercial family farms can produce substantially higher household incomes.

That does not mean every farmer is prosperous. Small farms struggle. Young farmers face enormous barriers because land and equipment cost so much.

But agriculture itself is not dying.

What I Learned During Those Illinois Summers

What stayed with me from those summers was not some romantic picture of a farmer sitting on a tractor watching the sunset.

It was the independence.

Farmers fix things. They improvise. They watch markets. They take risks. They plan years and understand that Washington cannot make the rain fall.

President Reagan understood that personality.

His answer was not to abolish every farm program. It was to trust the farmer more, open markets, lower barriers, fight inflation, and stop using agricultural exports as a bargaining chip.

Forty years later, American farmers feed this country and compete around the world using technology their grandparents could scarcely have imagined.

Mellencamp’s scarecrow deserves to be remembered.

But so does what came next.

The bank did not take the American farm.  The American farmer adapted, invested, modernized, and kept planting.  President Reagan bet on the farmer.  Looking across those Illinois fields today, that was a good bet.  Never bet against an Illinois farmer or any farmer, for that matter.

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Endnotes

1. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, “Statement on Terminating United States Restrictions on Agricultural Sales to the Soviet Union,” April 24, 1981.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/statement-terminating-united-states-restrictions-agricultural-sales-soviet-union

2. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, “Statement on Signing the Food Security Act of 1985,” December 23, 1985.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/statement-signing-food-security-act-1985

3. USDA Economic Research Service, “Small Family Farms Accounted for 86 Percent of U.S. Farms and Generated 17 Percent of the Value of Production in 2024.”
https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/114161

4. USDA Economic Research Service, “Productivity Growth Is the Major Driver of U.S. Agricultural Output Growth.”
https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58284

5. USDA Economic Research Service, “Land Use, Land Value & Tenure – Farmland Value.”
https://ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-value

6. USDA Economic Research Service, “Farming and Farm Income.”
https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income

7. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, “Remarks at the Werries Family Farm in Chapin, Illinois.”
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-werries-family-farm-chapin-illinois

David Lee writes on politics, budgets, and public accountability for Direct Line News.

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