California Farmers, Hit Hard by Trump’s Trade War, Haven’t Turned Against Him Yet

California’s agricultural sector, a small and rare base of support for President Trump in the liberal state, has been flipped on its head in the administration’s first 100 days, but it doesn’t appear that farmers are ready to stop backing him.

“He’s hurting the people who voted for him,” Colin Carter, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis, told KQED.

The industry already struggled to bounce back after the first Trump administration’s trade war with China and the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it is being rocked by what Sen. Alex Padilla called a “triple whammy”: farmworkers rattled by immigration enforcement; exports at risk of dwindling due to tariffs; and risky water use that could leave farmers in short supply this summer.

“Their workforce is worried, scared,” Padilla said on KQED’s Political Breakdown podcast this week, adding that even before Trump took office, January immigration raids in Bakersfield shook Kern County and the wider farmworker community.

Meanwhile, Trump’s ping-ponging tariffs, which have spurred a global trade war, are not only making imports more expensive but also affecting “the growers in California who export so much as part of their business,” Padilla said.

The levies have the potential to devastate California’s agriculture industry, according to Carter, who studied the fallout from the 2018–2019 trade war with China during Trump’s first term.

Its long-lasting effects show what is at risk for the industry right now, only “much worse,” Carter said.

“Prior to the early Trump trade war, China was the number one market for U.S. agriculture [exports],” he said. “The trade war that was initiated by Trump ruined that relationship, and China is no longer number one. And if we look at California, some California products were highly dependent on China.”

Prior to 2018, California’s export of tree nuts — mostly pistachios, walnuts and almonds — was lucrative and growing. Ninety-four percent of China’s tree nut imports came from the state.

But after China levied tariffs of up to 25% on some agricultural imports in response to U.S. tariffs, that 94% figure dropped to just 53%. California’s farmers lost about $900 million in revenue in one year as a result, according to Carter.

“In the case of almonds, China pivoted towards Australia. Australia can produce almonds; they increased their production and they have 0% tariffs,” Carter said. “[China] started increasing its own production of walnuts instead of buying them from California. It was a growing market, [and] California had a big market share that would have continued to grow, but that was all ruined.”

In 2019, Trump awarded $16 billion in relief for affected farms. There was some rebound in the years between that trade war and the current one, but California never regained the dominance it once held.

Now, on top of a near halt on exports to China under its 125% levies, trade wars with California’s other primary export partner in Canada, threaten the same lasting impact.

“California agriculture ships fruits and vegetables, wine up to Canada, and that’s already impacted,” Carter said. Canada is the state’s number one importer.

Canada imposed a 25% retaliatory tariff on U.S. wine. Instead of looking to California, which sent 34% of its exported wine to the country in 2022, Canada is relying on Europe.

Even if the trade war ebbs, “they may not come back to California,” Carter told KQED. “Trading in agriculture is a relationship that develops over time. And if one trading partner breaks that relationship, it doesn’t snap back overnight. It takes a long time to regain that trust.”

Farmworkers ‘refusing to come out’

The industry’s workforce is also under significant threat.

Immigrants made up at least 50% of the state’s farmworker population between 2010 and 2018, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California.

Those farmworkers are increasingly anxious and fearful, according to Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, the executive director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS), an advocacy nonprofit for farmworkers in Half Moon Bay. Even though Trump’s threat of mass deportations has not yet been widely carried out, the emotional and psychological fear it’s caused is already having effects.

“There’s a group of farmworkers … here on the North Coast and they have told our team that they’re refusing to come out beyond just their work duties,” Hernandez-Arriaga said. “They don’t want to leave the farm. They don’t want to come out for other things in the community because they don’t want to be at risk, and they’re scared.”

She said that in the days immediately after actions like the raids in Kern County, people have stayed home from work, worried that their farms would be targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, or that they could be stopped at a gas station on their way home.

While many immigrants were already fearful of ICE enforcement under the Biden administration, Hernandez-Arriaga said those she spoke to in Half Moon Bay didn’t feel like a target.

The current administration, she said, is “saying that they’re focusing on criminals, but that’s not what we’re seeing happening at all. In many ways, that’s what they’re using to market this increased deportation of immigrants.”

Farmers still on Trump’s side

Amid the threats both to agricultural workers and the industry’s economic stability, Padilla said he has been working with farmers and speaking with Republican colleagues about the impacts of Trump’s policies.

Blanket tariffs risk retaliation and could harm the farmers they try to protect, warned Shannon Douglass, president of the California Farm Bureau, which advocates for the state’s farmers and ranchers.

“A more strategic approach is targeted enforcement, not blanket tariffs,” she said in a statement. “Strengthening and enforcing provisions of trade agreements like USMCA, expanding export markets and ensuring fair competition through diplomatic discussions would likely protect California farmers without triggering unnecessary retaliation.”

Still, Carter noted that Trump didn’t lose very much support from California farmers after his 2018–2019 trade war, and there hasn’t been a dramatic outpouring of opposition from them in recent months either.

“It is a mystery,” Carter said.

He added that it could be because farmers believe they’ll benefit from the long-term effects of the tariff policy.

“President Trump and [trade advisor] Peter Navarro and [Secretary of Commerce Howard] Lutnick, I’ve seen them on CNN complaining about how U.S. agriculture’s ripped off in Canada, in Australia, in the European Union,” Carter said. “Actually, that’s just not correct.”

He said California exports 40% of its agricultural goods and that the U.S. has done well in recent decades because of lower trade barriers.

Other farmers are hoping that high prices will be worth it for less restricted water resources, he said. In January, Trump announced a “presidential action” that directed the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Interior to develop a plan that would route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to dry parts of the state.

But he also flushed 2 billion gallons of water from dams in the Sierra Nevada foothills in February, claiming that it would help give Los Angeles and California “virtually unlimited water.” The fires had already been fully contained at the time.

Carter isn’t sure whether farmers will start to rethink their support for Trump if tariffs begin to make a bigger dent in their revenue, or if their workforce is decimated — as it would be should he carry out his threat of mass deportations.

“[Trump] had a lot of support in the Central Valley, and even though they were harmed during the first trade war,” Carter told KQED. “It does make you wonder how much pain they’re willing to take.”