Deep Reads: Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As an American farmer, JJ Ficken, 37, was 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.
But then President Donald Trump, in the earliest days of his second term, threatened to break tens of thousands of those deals, suspending billions in agricultural funding and decimating the staffs that managed it. Swept up in the freeze was JJ 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.
John Woodrow Cox reported, wrote and read the piece. Sarah Blaskey co-wrote the story. David Ovalle contributed to the report. Bishop Sand composed music and produced audio for the piece.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports weekend. |
| 0:04.7 | It's Saturday, July 5th. |
| 0:06.8 | Today, I'm handing the mic over to my colleague John Woodrow Cox. |
| 0:11.1 | John is an enterprise reporter for The Post, |
| 0:13.4 | and he wrote this story as part of our occasional deep-read series, |
| 0:17.9 | which features the best of the post's narrative reporting. |
| 0:21.6 | Here's John. |
| 0:23.3 | So really what this story is about is commitment. |
| 0:28.1 | The entire farming industry, farming in America, is built on commitment. |
| 0:32.0 | It is the commitment of farmers to take on an unreasonable, extraordinary amount of uncertainty |
| 0:38.9 | every moment of every day, all of which could prove fatal to their businesses and has. |
| 0:45.8 | We've lost hundreds of thousands of farms over the past decade. |
| 0:50.1 | And yet, they get up every day and they farm. |
| 0:53.0 | And that's because they've made a commitment to do it. |
| 0:55.4 | On the other side of that is a government that in exchange for those farmers' commitment has agreed to sustain them. |
| 1:03.3 | A farmer who takes that notion very seriously is a man in eastern Colorado named J.J. Ficken. |
| 1:09.4 | He's a corn farmer. He's 37 years old. He grew up in town |
| 1:14.4 | of 61 people. And in 2023, along came what he thought was a life-changing opportunity. |
| 1:22.0 | It was a grant program through the USDA that said, if you're willing to provide really good working conditions, |
| 1:31.5 | to either a domestic worker or to a migrant labor, we will cover the cost of that worker over the |
| 1:36.7 | course of two years. |
| 1:39.7 | For him, it absolutely aligned with his worldview, too, right? |
... |
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