I Guess This Is What Happens When You Put Big Balls In Charge Of Farm Policy

Rural America Deserves to be More Than a Punchline

No, OnlyFarms.gov isn’t a website where you pay to watch farmers get screwed by the government.

At least not yet. But with this White House, who knows what they’re working on next?

Last Friday, the Trump administration unveiled “OnlyFarms.gov.” It’s a new federal website named after a subscription platform primarily known for adult content, launched to celebrate National Agriculture Day.

To mark the occasion, White House officials parked a golden tractor on the South Lawn and invited 800 farmers to attend. Everyone in attendance watched awkwardly as the president got easily distracted by the shiny machinery. Trump stepped away from the microphone mid-speech to admire it. “That’s crazy!” he said. “Wow, that is really something, right?”

Then he told the farmers that they don’t care about the weather.

“The one thing about farmers,” Trump said, “they don’t care about that weather.”

Farmers don’t care about the weather? Seriously?

With these people in charge, it’s no wonder we’re heading into the worst farm crisis in generations.

The agricultural sector is getting squeezed from every direction: High fuel costs, high fertilizer costs, and tariffs that have tanked export markets and raised input prices. And China, once the top U.S. ag export market, isn’t coming back.

At a recent legislative hearing in Pennsylvania, experts described how stress, isolation, economic uncertainty, and family pressures are taking a serious toll on farmers, in some cases contributing to suicide. The discussion showed just how high the stakes are right now in farm country.

The administration’s response to all of this was a pun website and a golden tractor.

Even Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky wasn’t buying it. “Your tax dollars are paying for the USDA to parody a porn site,” he wrote on social media, and called on the administration to delete the tweet and the URL.

He was right, but also failed to address the bigger point.

The name isn’t the only problem. The problem is that this is what rural engagement looks like from an administration with no real connection to rural America. To them, OnlyFarms.gov is just a joke, an attention-getting stunt while the real machinery of rural support gets dismantled in the background.

In contrast to Donald Trump’s parody website, the Biden administration built Rural.gov as a front door to the federal government for rural communities. It was one place where local leaders could find desperately needed funding opportunities, technical assistance, and programs for residents, families, veterans, small businesses, and agricultural producers.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a critical resource for small towns that don’t have a grant writer on staff, or a lobbyist in Washington, or an inside connection at USDA. It lowered the cost of doing the basic work of keeping a community alive.

When DOGE came to Washington with its chainsaw, Rural.gov went down. Elected officials complained loudly enough that they grudgingly brought it back, but then they yanked it again for good in February.

They didn’t care about farmers enough to replace it or even make an excuse for it. And Rural.gov was just the beginning.

At USDA Rural Development, long one of the few federal partners that help rural communities, private investment and philanthropy won’t touch; the remaining staff is stretched thin after all the DOGE cuts.

The agency that once helped local governments and small businesses get off the ground is struggling to keep up. That’s a crisis for communities that were already working with limited capacity.

Well, here at RuralOrganizing.org, we’re not going to wait for Washington to fix what DOGE destroyed. That’s why we built RuralFunding.org.

RuralFunding.org is designed to fill the gap left by Rural.gov and do something the federal government has never quite managed to do: make the rural federal funding landscape actually navigable for the people who need it most.

RuralFunding.org pulls together federal data sources that have never been connected in one place for rural communities: Daily updates from Grants.gov, so you don’t miss a deadline because a listing was buried. Actual award data from USASpending.gov by county and program; not just what’s posted, but what’s actually flowing. County-level data on poverty, broadband access, income, and unemployment from the Census Bureau, so local leaders understand what their community is up against when we walk into a funding conversation. And USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes, so rural places can be compared to one another, not distorted by metro-county data.

This grew out of years of advocacy work at Rural Progress, the national nonpartisan nonprofit started by the founders of RuralOrganizing.org. Our team has helped secure and influence billions of dollars in federal investment for rural communities. We know how this system works, we know where it fails rural people, and we built RuralFunding.org to close that gap.

RuralFunding.org is just a small start. What rural America really needs is a coordinating body in Washington with real authority, something like a National Office of Rural Prosperity with White House-level leadership and a mandate that reaches beyond USDA.

Because the problems rural communities face don’t stop at the USDA fence line. Our needs span housing, education, healthcare, small-business development, and job creation across the entire federal government. A single agency, even a well-funded and well-staffed one, can’t solve that alone.

But that’s not what we have right now. Right now, we have a 19-year-old DOGE engineer who goes by “Big Balls” making decisions that hurt rural communities nationwide. We have a golden tractor on the South Lawn and a president who thinks farmers don’t care about the weather. We have a joke website where farmers are the punchline, because nobody in this administration takes rural America seriously enough to do the actual work.

Rural America deserves more than scraps and slogans.

We deserve a federal government that shows up, listens, and follows through. And until that day comes, we’ll keep building tools that make it harder for Washington to hide the ball.