By Aidan Williams
As the costs of Donald Trump’s Iran war and higher tariffs pile up on farmers, U.S. Senate candidates in Iowa and Nebraska are stoking populist anger by seizing on long-simmering grievances against giant agricultural companies.
Farmers are typically one of the Republican party’s most reliable constituencies. Any inroads among them could be pivotal to unusually competitive campaigns to wrest away two Republican-held seats in those states and Democrats’ broader fight to win control of the Senate.
Dan Osborn, a political independent mounting a formidable bid to unseat incumbent Nebraska Republican Senator Pete Ricketts, regularly uses campaign stops in farm areas to attack the two corporate giants that dominate U.S. fertilizer sales and the four meatpacking behemoths that buy most of the livestock slaughtered in the country. The two candidates have sparred over the issue on social media.
“We are not in a free market. A free market encourages competition, and that’s what brings down costs,” Osborn, an industrial mechanic and former labor union leader, said in an interview.
U.S. farmers’ view of their current conditions sank in June to the lowest level since before President Donald Trump started his second term, according to Purdue University’s Ag Economy Barometer, a monthly sentiment survey. The financial pressure feeds long-running accusations that big companies are profiting at farmers’ expense.
The Senate contests in both of the Farm Belt states are now competitive, though Nebraska hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2006 and Iowa since 2008.
The populist impulse against agribusiness giants is strengthening at a time other forces are primarily driving the recent price movements squeezing both consumers in the grocery store aisles and farmers on the land.
“While consolidation is certainly a factor contributing to the current downturn in the U.S. farm economy, it is something that farmers have been facing for decades,” said Shelby Bass, a spokesperson at AgAmerica, one of the nation’s top farm lenders. “Industry consolidation has more of a long-term structural impact, while current financial pressure is primarily being driven by short-term economic shocks such as high costs, tighter credit conditions, and geopolitical instability.”
In a sign of Republican concern over U.S. farmers’ frustration, the White House asked Congress to include $11 billion in new aid to farmers in an emergency budget request for Iran war funding. The Trump administration has also publicly signaled it takes seriously complaints the agricultural giants are abusing their market power.
“I’d be lying if I said times were good,” Cordt Holub, a fourth-generation Iowa corn farmer and Republican activist who sat beside Trump when the president announced a previous farm aid package in December, said in an interview. “Farmers feel as though we’re getting taken advantage of by the corporate world.”
Two companies, Nutrien and Mosaic, control 90% of U.S. potassium and phosphate fertilizer production following decades of merger activity. Four meatpackers – JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and National Beef, which is controlled by Brazil’s Marfig Global Foods – account for 70% of livestock purchased for slaughter, compared with 26% in 1980.
In the seed market, two companies — Bayer and Corteva — supplied 72% of U.S. planted corn acres and 66% of planted soybean acres in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even before the Iran war price spikes, fertilizer prices surged 170% over the past two decades through Jan. 1 and the cost of seeds rose 155% per planted acre for corn and 90% for soybeans over the period.
Andy Green, a former senior USDA adviser on competition policy under President Joe Biden, said the industries’ consolidation has shifted market power from farmers to large corporations, holding down prices farmers can get for livestock while pushing up seed and fertilizer prices.
Recent price moves for what farmers sell and buy are complicated.
In beef, for example, supply fundamentals remain the key driver of higher prices. Processors are currently losing money in their beef businesses, while some pockets of ranchers are profiting as the number of cattle raised in the U.S. has declined to the lowest level in decades.
Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for The Meat Institute, a trade association that counts executives from the Big Four meatpackers as board members, said in a statement livestock markets “are competitive and dynamic.”
Fertilizer prices, meanwhile, have been roiled by Russia’s war in Ukraine, U.S. tariffs on some shipments, and the U.S.’s attacks on Iran. While some North American fertilizer producers did profit earlier this year, others are losing money as their production costs also go up.
Mosaic Co. said in an emailed statement that fertilizer prices “are influenced by a wide range of well‑documented market factors” including energy costs and transportation constraints. “These forces, not individual producers, drive pricing across the industry,” the statement added.
Nutrien did not respond to a request for comment.
Seed companies too have said that the cost of their products isn’t comparable to past years. Innovations in genetically-modified seeds have improved farmers’ crop yields while costing Bayer and Corteva billions of dollars annually in research and development.
“Seed is one of the only inputs that gets better every year,” said Todd Frazier, Corteva’s vice president of U.S. marketing.
Grain prices have been pressured by the U.S.’s trade tensions with China, and pork prices have been low due to weak consumer demand.
Egg prices did shoot up last year due to bird flu outbreaks, and a trio of producers recently settled an antitrust investigation that found the companies had coordinated illegally to influence a price index. Even so, egg prices have plunged sharply as supply overcorrected into a glut.
Still, plenty of farmers are angered as they watch food prices shoot up and their finances worsen.
“We’re scrimping and saving,” said Jason Orr, a 46-year-old, fifth-generation northeast Iowa corn grower who operates the family farm together with his 70-year-old father and 26-year-old son. “The public is griping about the cost of food, but it’s not the person producing the food that’s getting all the money, it’s the manufacturers and middlemen.”
Osborn promises to fight “corporate monopolies stealing money from producers” and push for more vigorous enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, which is designed to ensure competition in livestock markets and protect farmers and ranchers against unfair or deceptive practices by meatpackers. That cause has also been championed by Senate Democrats, including party leader Chuck Schumer.
Ricketts, the Republican incumbent, in a brief hallway interview in the Capitol, touted efforts he made when he was the state’s governor to establish independent meatpacking plants, which he frames as a model to restore competition.
“The key that we need is more competition,” Ricketts said. His campaign declined a more in-depth interview with the senator.
In Iowa, the nation’s largest corn producer, Democratic contender Josh Turek is attacking “the monopolies that are jacking up” prices for essential farm supplies as he campaigns for an open U.S. Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Senator Joni Ernst.
Most polls show Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist and state legislator, in a tight race with his Republican opponent, Representative Ashley Hinson. In June, she claimed credit for a provision in the House version of a government spending bill that would require the USDA to assess the impact of industry consolidation on fertilizer costs.
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For decades, agriculture consolidated with little resistance from Washington. But with rising costs dominating the 2026 midterms, the Trump administration has ramped up its public profile on competition concerns.
In September, the Justice Department and USDA agreed to collaborate on policing competition in agricultural markets. Two months later, Trump signed an executive order setting up a task force to investigate anti-competitive behavior in the food supply chain.
In March, Bloomberg reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether several leading fertilizer producers, including Nutrien and Mosaic, colluded to raise prices. Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden branded the two conglomerates a “duopoly” in public comments to the National Agricultural Law Center.
The issue has gained traction on Capitol Hill as well. A coalition of Senate Democrats introduced legislation in March that would force meatpackers to limit themselves to processing one major type of meat, such as beef, pork or poultry, while imposing limits on beef market concentration at both the regional and national level.
“When I go through the country and talk to farmers, they are outraged,” said Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who has championed the legislation on the Senate Agriculture Committee. “They feel like politicians in Washington don’t care for them because we’re not dealing with the larger structural issue of corporate concentration.”
Ricketts, who has opposed the measure in the Senate, derided it as “politically, cynically motivated.”
The Meat Institute responded that Senate Democrats’ bill would “destroy” the meatpacking industry with production limits and forced divestitures, raise meat prices and eliminate union jobs.
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