Deep Reads: Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future

0:01John Deere is putting in work and putting up highlights. Oh man, look at those passes. Tillage, planting, harvesting. Three years in and these pre-owned machines are still at the top of their game. We're talking reliability, performance and long-term potential. And get this, these veteran machines can pick up the latest precision tech with ease. You know it and fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at machinefinder.com. Booyah! From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports Weekend. It's Saturday, July 5th. Today, I'm handing the mic over to my colleague, John Woodrow Cox.

0:40John is an enterprise reporter for The Post, and he wrote this story as part of our occasional deep read series, which features the best of The Post's narrative reporting. Here's John. So really what this story is about is commitment.

0:58JJ Ficken:The entire farming industry, farming in America, is built on commitment. It is the commitment of farmers to take on an unreasonable, extraordinary amount of uncertainty every moment of every day, all of which could prove fatal to their businesses and has. We've lost hundreds of thousands of farms over the past decade. And yet they get up every day and they farm. And that's because they've made a commitment to do it. On the other side of that is a government that, in exchange for those farmers' commitment, has agreed to sustain them. A farmer who takes that notion very seriously is a man in eastern Colorado named J.J.

1:38JJ Ficken:Ficken. He's a corn farmer. He's 37 years old. He grew up in a town of 61 people. And in 2023, along came what he thought was a life-changing opportunity. It was a grant program through the USDA that said, if you're willing to provide really good working conditions to either a domestic worker or to a migrant laborer, we will cover the cost of that worker over the course of two years. For him, it absolutely aligned with his worldview too, right? He believed in this. He at any time could have gone out and hired an undocumented laborer for$14 an hour, but he refused to do that. He had paid instead a premium to a local guy who grew up in the community, and he'd done that for years.

2:26JJ Ficken:But here came this opportunity that he viewed as something that would transform his farm's future, his family's future. So he signs up. He's awarded the grant. $200 ,000 is what he was promised from the federal government. And he starts making investments in that. He finds a rental home for this guy to use. He goes out and hires a recruiting agency to go find candidates in Latin America. He hires a guy, a guy from Guatemala named Otto Vargas, who's 24 years old. He's the youngest candidate J.J. interviewed, but he sounded really eager. And then President Trump takes office. And on his very first day, he signs executive orders targeting legislation that President Biden had passed and targeting DEI, the concept of DEI, trying to basically undo any links to DEI.

3:16JJ Ficken:And as a result of those executive orders, thousands of contracts to the USDA are frozen. One of the things that's targeted is this grant that JJ is a part of. Suddenly the money's frozen. And that's when I really enter JJ's story. He's at this moment of enormous tension where all these commitments, right, all these commitments that he had counted on are at risk. He doesn't know if Otto will even make it from Guatemala. He doesn't know if Otto will work out when he gets there. He doesn't know if the government will come through, in his mind, if Trump will come through with this money. So I really wanted to see this play out on the ground.

3:55JJ Ficken:I wanted to see it unfold as it happened. The day that I arrived in Colorado was the same day that his local guy, the local laborer, he quit. Just a few hours before my plane landed. So I spent nearly two weeks over the course of two trips watching him process the stress, his very complicated feelings about the president that I saw evolve in real time. And I saw him interact with other farmers who, like J.J., believed that the government did waste a lot of money, was overspending. It was partly the reason that J.J. and all these other guys voted for the president. But then suddenly he's dealing with it in a very real way, and he totally rejected the notion that this grant, which in his mind represented doing things the right way, he rejected the idea that this was a waste.

4:48JJ Ficken:And meanwhile, my colleague Sarah Blaski was reporting on all the upheaval behind the scenes that's unfolding inside the USDA, hundreds and hundreds of miles away in Washington, D.C. Okay, here is J.J. and Otto's story.

5:14JJ Ficken:There was a saying he'd heard about how every farmer rooted for all the other farmers to do well too until one of those others started farming next door. So J.J. Ficken didn't talk much about the grant money with other farmers. But his bills had mounted, and his ambitions had unraveled. And in Kirk, a town of 61, it was easy to feel alone. Now, on that afternoon in mid-April, J.J., who was 37 years old, unstrapped the bags of seed corn on his trailer for a customer. How are you? J.J. said, extending his hand to a man he'd known all his life. They'd played ball together, shared in family trips.

5:53JJ Ficken:So J.J. decided to tell him. The federal government had promised J.J. a$200 ,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family's future. But, J.J. explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money. Good, the man said, grinning. Too much spending here and there. I'm okay with a little hurt. J.J. took a breath. It needed to be done, J.J.

6:36JJ Ficken:said, softly, because he was also a Republican, who, like nearly every farmer he knew, thought the country wasted too much money. But not all of it, J.J. said, because he rejected the notion that his grant was a waste. I guess, J.J. said, because he didn't want to argue. Hurt was something J.J. already understood. It had been part of the landscape long before Trump took office. J.J. was an American farmer, perpetually subject to weather, labor, loans, overhead, markets, health, politics. None of it was predictable, and all of it was a threat. The industry's survival has long depended on the deals made between millions of Americans willing to brave all that uncertainty and a federal government willing to sustain them through grants, subsidies, insurance, financing, payouts, and disaster relief.

7:29JJ Ficken:But then Trump, in the earliest days of his second term, threatened to break tens of thousands of those deals, suspending billions in agriculture funding and decimating the staffs that managed it. Swept up in the freeze was J.J. and the$50 million grant program he'd signed up for, along with 140 other farmers across the country. All of them had agreed to hire and, in many cases, house domestic workers or lawful immigrants willing to take jobs that Americans would not. But with the reimbursements in doubt, farmers worried they'd miss payrolls, default on loans, or face bankruptcy. Many feared the checks would never come.

8:07JJ Ficken:I tried to do things right, J.J. said, because he could have taken on an undocumented laborer at any time for$14 an hour, as many of his neighbors had, but he didn't believe in supporting illegal immigration. Almost nothing mattered more to him than his word, and he'd kept it to the U.S. government. He committed to buy a plane ticket for a 24-year-old from Guatemala named Otto Vargas. He'd rented him a single wide. He'd bought him an old pickup to use. He'd spent tens of thousands of dollars to do what the grant required, covering most of it with a line of credit at 8.5 % interest. Now, he didn't know if Otto would ever get here, or if the government would ever pay him back.

8:51JJ Ficken:J.J. had joined 81 % of Yuma County's voters in supporting Trump, whom he considered the better of two bad options. He wanted to believe that the president would honor his many pledges to do right by people like him. Trump had posted to Truth Social that very day, quote, The USA will, in all caps, protect our farmers.

9:14JJ Ficken:J.J. needed that to be true as he climbed into his dodge, turned onto a gravel road, and drove toward the horizon, where eastern Colorado's parched brown canvas converged with the cloudless sky. Nothing else was within view. No people, no cows, no homes or barns, pickups or tractors. Out here, it was just J.J. in the dirt.

9:45JJ Ficken:It was the fall of 2023, and an ad urging farmers to apply for the grant program had been playing for months on the radio when J.J.'s wife finally brought it up. Why not? Cassidy asked. Larger farms paid specialists to handle the paperwork, but Cassidy, who was 36 years old, believed they could take on the applications themselves, and they did, slogging through 40 hours of maddening federal bureaucracy. Each night, they put their two kids to bed and sifted through hundreds of pages of guides and forms in J.J.'s basement office. Taped to his walls were bits of motivation and financial advice. A line at the top, bolded and underlined, read, Stay the Course.

10:26JJ Ficken:J.J. was a fourth-generation farmer, but had been handed no wealth, land, or expensive equipment from his parents, who divorced when he was about six. To make a living, he had baled hay and helped raise neighbors wheat, soybeans, pinto beans, great northern beans, and alfalfa. Now he rented and farmed his mom's two circles of corn, each about 125 acres, and partnered with his dad to sell seed corn. He and Cassidy, a dental hygienist, married in 2012 and slipped into debt in their early 20s. They dug themselves out with advice from Dave Ramsey's books, Save for Big Purchases and Live Below Your Means.

11:03JJ Ficken:The couple paid off their home early, opened investment accounts, bought a small rental house. They'd avoided serious debt since, but the promise of a grant and another worker inspired J.J. to make a bigger bet on himself. In the months after applying, he bought a 2012 Combine, a 2013 Planner, a 2013 Cornheader, a 2000 Dodge pickup meant for Otto, and a second Haystacker, the only new piece of equipment he'd ever owned. J.J. paid cash as much as he could, but still owed more than$380 ,000. At the time, it didn't scare him, because with Otto, the grant money, the farmhand he already had, and the extra margin he'd pocket from owning his machinery, J.J.

11:45JJ Ficken:figured he could pay it all off in three years. His investment spoke to the value that even one dependable worker can bring to today's farms, where more than 40 % of the workforce is undocumented. To address the critical shortage of labor and stem the flow of undocumented immigrants, the U.S. Agriculture Department unveiled the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program in 2023. With the grant, farms could bring on foreign workers through the H-2A visa program and, in exchange, provide good working conditions. Tracy Vins was assured$400 ,000 for her organic farm in Wisconsin. She said, I've employed Americans, and they quit after a few days.

12:26JJ Ficken:They quit after a few hours. Mitch Lawson is a Georgia produce farmer who lost nearly two dozen American employees before he qualified for$200 ,000. He said, I've had a couple who didn't even last a whole day. In Trump's first term, he gave farmers$23 billion to cover the losses from his trade war with China, and he expanded support programs through a new farm bill, an achievement President Joe Biden's administration would fail to match. Trump, sitting before a pair of John Deere tractors, told a crowd in Pennsylvania this past fall, nobody's done for farmers what I've done. Then, four months later, he halted the grant payments.

13:08JJ Ficken:On January 20th, his first day in office, Trump signed executive orders intended to block funding from Biden-era climate legislation and purged links to, quote, diversity, equity, and inclusion, known as DEI. Baffled staffers at the Agriculture Department told the Washington Post they struggled to interpret vague directions dictating who should and shouldn't be paid. The process is changing more than once a day, Tricia Kovacs, a deputy administrator, told managers according to a record of the meeting. Staff abandoned their normal work to defend programs that appeared to have nothing to do with DEI.

13:46JJ Ficken:Many were snagged in a broad search for keywords branded problematic. Among the misfires was the widespread flagging of, quote, biodiversity. J.J.'s grant was frozen in late January, as top administrators considered whether to cancel it. Over the next two months, more than 20 farmers requested$4 million owed to them, according to documents reviewed by the Post. None were paid. Dozens of farmers in the program met in a virtual call to share updates and commiserate. Later starting a chat group, JJ joined. Some considered filing lawsuits. Jason Harris, a Trump voter offered a$400 ,000 grant for his farm in Mississippi, wrote Republican senators in early April.

14:30JJ Ficken:Why are you ignoring a military veteran? He said later, the longer these funds are not released, it is starting to make me think that you do not care for people like me. Citing litigation, an Agriculture Department spokesperson declined to answer questions, including whether the agency intended to cancel the program. But the White House defended Trump. Spokesperson Anna Kelly wrote in a statement, quote, Farmers helped propel President Trump to victory in November because they knew he would negotiate better trade deals, cut red tape, and boost American exports. They were right. Since January, President Trump has delivered a historic deal with the UK, with more deals on the way, and eliminated bureaucracy and bloat at USDA, which is why farmer sentiment has improved across the country.

15:18JJ Ficken:End quote. She cited a survey from April that showed farmers were increasingly optimistic about their future. As that poll was conducted, farmers in Tennessee, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota, California, and Georgia, who'd signed up for the grant program, told the Post they'd drain their savings or taken on debt. In Oregon, a pear farmer had to cash out her children's life insurance policies. In West Virginia, a farmer who'd risked raising a dozen new fruits and vegetables feared she'd have to close if the money never came. In Maine, a broccoli farmer already contemplating bankruptcy doubted he'd last another year without it.

16:07JJ Ficken:Otto was the youngest candidate J.J. interviewed, but he sounded eager. Through an interpreter, Otto told him he wanted to learn English, and J.J. told Otto he wanted to learn Spanish. The language barrier didn't concern J.J. when he offered him the job. He already had another worker, a 21-year-old named Riggan Williams, who had grown up in the community. As long as he had Riggin, J.J. wouldn't have to ask Otto to deal with customers or operate the most technical equipment. Then, one morning in mid-April, Riggin quit. He had found a job with regular hours and didn't want to spend another season bailing hay.

16:44JJ Ficken:He gave J.J. two weeks' notice and told him he hoped the new guy worked out. But the new guy was still in Guatemala, waiting for a visa. J.J. couldn't even apply for the first installment of his grant money until Otto arrived. which should have happened weeks earlier. He'd heard from a recruiter that the administration's attempt to make the government more efficient had slowed the visa process throughout Central America. J.J. tried not to panic, but suddenly, for him to operate, Otto had to make it to Colorado. And if he did, he had to work out. The stakes were still on J.J.'s mind that afternoon when a neighbor stopped by his shop and, as it often did, The conversation turned to Trump's overhaul of the federal government.

17:30JJ Ficken:Eric Smith had grown up in Yuma County, joined the Navy, and returned to Kirk to raise his two daughters and work the family land. He said, there will be some growing pains. There will be some caught in the fray that, you know, maybe shouldn't have been caught. J.J. handed cans of Michelob Ultra to Eric and Riggin, who was patching a tire. J.J. had voted for Trump in part because of the president's promises to cut spending, but he'd never imagined the cuts would target a core Trump constituency. It made no sense to J.J., who said he didn't even know what DEI stood for, much less what it had come to represent.

18:08JJ Ficken:He didn't hire Otto to promote an agenda, and he didn't think the government owed him a handout. The Agriculture Department had sought out J.J. and the other farmers, promoting an opportunity intended to lift the whole country. J.J. considered what Trump was doing and how he fit into it. Quote, I'd like to think a year from now, what's being done now, we see the benefits from it. I would hope. He didn't care much for politics, preferring parenting and self-help books to partisan podcasts. The fervor Trump inspired unsettled him. He'd hated trying to explain the f*** Biden flag outside town to his daughter.

18:46JJ Ficken:But J.J. found elements of the president's rhetoric appealing. He, too, resented that the country sent billions of dollars abroad when so many people here needed support. Eric understood why J.J. had signed up for the grant program. Eric, who was 47 years old, had taken on more than$800 ,000 in debt to manage his hayfields and buy equipment, and he flew commercial airliners to cover the bills. Eric said, So you're bringing over help? Mm-hmm. J.J. replied, explaining that, like all businesses in the H-2A program, he'd first been required to advertise the job to U.S. citizens. None applied. People don't want to work, Eric said.

19:29JJ Ficken:Riggin sipped his beer. The conversation was not about him, but that didn't make it less awkward. He had originally committed to two more years, prompting J.J. to buy the second haystacker. But Riggin changed his mind. In the new job, as a field tech working on phone lines, he'd earn more money, get health insurance, and make it home for dinner. Eric, meanwhile, wondered what working in Kirk would feel like for an outsider. F***ing winds blowing all the time, it's every shade of brown, he said. It's hard. You can't get people to do it. JJ took another swig. He hoped that wasn't true.

20:17JJ Ficken:In Guatemala, Otto was pleading with God. From his rural hometown of Aldea Chispan, he prayed that he get a job interview. And when he did, he prayed he'd do well. And when he did, he prayed he'd receive an offer. And when he did, he prayed the United States would let him come. Otto had made the six-hour round-trip drive to interview for his visa on April 15th, the same day Reagan quit. Now he waited, worrying he would be denied or J.J. would back out. The two men had spoken during their video interview for just 17 minutes. Each week, Otto missed because of the delay cost him at least$700 in lost wages, and all of it mattered to Otto.

20:57JJ Ficken:His family's 40-acre farm, he said, had struggled in recent years. Bad winters killed crops. A lost onion harvest squandered five months of work. He had told J.J. that nothing mattered more between a worker and a boss than trust, but he wasn't certain he had the experience to earn that trust. He'd learned on his dad's old tractors nothing like what he expected to face in Colorado. His earliest memories were on the farm, fetching his dad's tools. His father would dig a little hole, and Otto would press fertilizer into the soil by hand. In the flatlands east of the mountains, he'd learned to tolerate temperatures that topped 110 degrees.

21:35JJ Ficken:During planting season, he and his dad would rest in the shade of their lemon trees, sweating and laughing and sharing his mother's empanadas. Now his dad was 64, and Otto dreaded leaving him. He relied on Otto to manage the land, but Otto also leaned on his dad, who had tried to prepare him for the United States, a place he'd never visited. In the months since Trump took office, Otto said, he'd seen videos on Facebook of immigrants being harassed and arrested. He said in Spanish, You get to thinking about all the people who are here for a better future, for their family. It's very difficult. His dad insisted that if an officer confronted him, he should do what he was told, never argue.

22:17JJ Ficken:So Otto made a plan. He would hurry to type a message into the translation app on his phone, asking if he could use it to communicate. He would offer documentation that proved he was legal. He would ask to call his boss, who he hoped could explain that everything was okay.

22:44JJ Ficken:J.J. loaded his kids and their lunch boxes into the backseat of the pickup, and now, just after 8 a.m. on April 17th, a Thursday, he pulled a trailer to his father's place and made a list of the work ahead. Deliver 7 ,000 pounds of seed corn to a farmer an hour away. Prep his ripper for a neighbor who asked to rent it. Bring his corn header inside in case of rain. Fix a sprinkler and mow the lawn and finish installing the water heater. Then J.J. remembered. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Vivi, what's your sugar at? In October, Vivian, who was seven years old, had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

23:21JJ Ficken:The whole family changed diets, even her four-year-old brother, Henry. She needed constant monitoring and frequent insulin shots and regular appointments two hours west in Denver. So the couple decided to homeschool both kids. In the pickup, Vivian reached for her phone, linked through Bluetooth with a monitor on her arm. She said, It's at 127. See? She passed the phone up to her dad. She needed insulin. He sped up.

23:54JJ Ficken:At his father's shop, J.J. figured out the dosage on her phone, and a bottle cap-sized pump on her leg injected the medication. He asked, Did you hear it go beep-beep on you? J.J. had accepted that farm work would shape their life at home, and he made certain the reverse was true, too. The kids slowed him down, scaling stacks of corn bags and pretending the trailer was a pirate ship, but he still took them along. He'd come to think of himself as the sum of his commitments. First to the kids and Cassidy and God, then to his customers, whom he owed fair prices and honest answers. To the country, whose flag he'd pasted along both sides of his grain cart.

24:34JJ Ficken:to the land so it might survive another generation, to Riggan until he collected his last paycheck, and now to Otto, a stranger from a faraway place. J.J. sometimes faltered, but when he did, he tried to make it right. He expected the same of others, and that included the president, who he'd never believe in again if the grant didn't come through. No way in hell, J.J. said. After two hernia surgeries and hundreds of fitful nights, J.J. hoped his children found a different path. He and Cassidy had already started saving for their college. The couple suspected Vivian would prefer city life. He said she loves the city light, but Henry was just like him.

25:18JJ Ficken:Now, as J.J. fired up the forklift, his son hurried over to sit beside him, legs straddling the lovers. Henry had dressed to match his dad, in blue jeans, work boots, and a hoodie. At home, in his bedroom, he'd carefully organized a collection of toy harvesters, grain bins, hay bales, and seed boxes. J.J., who had dropped out of college before attending an automotive technology program, had rehearsed what he might someday pitch to Henry. Why don't you go be an architect and then own you a farm, a hobby farm? Do it a different way. Do this for a tax write-off, not to feed your kids. J.J. and Cassidy had been a year apart at the only high school in their community.

25:59JJ Ficken:She graduated in a class of eight, J.J. a class of five. Opportunities were scant. The couple had once imagined the grant might allow J.J. more time with the kids, freeing Cassidy to earn her master's degree. She'd worked for years as a dental hygienist in rural offices that turned away people on Medicaid. She and a partner had started their own office and turned away no one, but Cassidy needed an advanced degree to provide treatments their poorest patients couldn't afford elsewhere. She told her husband, maybe next year. One night in their kitchen, Cassidy prepared a meatloaf as she considered the relentless uncertainty their family navigated.