Happy Friday! Grab your coffee — Washington just put a hard number on the farm safety net, Ag in Motion wrapped its last day near Saskatoon with some genuinely massive iron, and Uncle Sam is dropping $35 million on wild pigs.

Let's get into it.

What happened: USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins told the Senate Appropriations Committee this week that Washington wants another $11.1 billion in supplemental farm aid — $10 billion for 2026 row and specialty crop growers, plus $1.1 billion for last winter's freeze losses.

Stack that on the $44.3 billion in payments already expected this year and you get $55.4 billion in total US farm support. Spread across 153.8 million taxpayers, that's roughly $360 a head.

Why it happened: This is the same farm-aid story we've been tracking all week, but it just got a hard number attached.

Ag economist Wes Davis of Meridian Ag frames it as a "bridge or pier" question: is this temporary relief while trade wars sort themselves out, or is US farm income quietly becoming a government program?

His math says US support has crept from 7-8% of farm gross receipts historically to 10-12% now, closing in on the EU's 16-18%.

And because US support is tied to output instead of decoupled like Europe's, it can push farmers to keep planting through a downturn — which keeps supplies high and prices low, which then calls for more support.

Davis calls it a "snowplow effect": push it long enough, and eventually there's too much snow to move.

What it means for the farm gate: This isn't a Canadian story on paper, but it's one Prairie producers should watch closely.

Every dollar Washington throws at "temporary" trade-war relief is a signal about how long Washington expects the trade friction with Canada to last — and Ottawa is having its own version of this exact bridge-or-pier conversation over AgriStability and business risk management funding.

If the US treats this as structural rather than a bridge, don't be surprised if the pressure to match it shows up here too.

👉 Read the full story