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At a White House event announcing that the Trump administration will bail out US farmers to the tune of $12 billion, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on Monday seemed befuddled by high food production costs and praised the president for taking steps to get to the bottom of this mystery.

“The president has been very unequivocal in saying ‘We gotta figure out why all these input costs are skyrocketing,’” Rollins said, noting that, for example, the cost of fertilizer is up 36 percent and that of manual labor 47 percent.

Now, we may disagree with this administration on a great many things, but we are on the same page when it comes to the importance of ensuring that the United States has access to a stable food supply, and we want Americans to pay less for their groceries, so we thought that we would help Rollins put together this puzzle.

In this case, the answer is right in front of her… or at least it would be if she turned her head a little bit to the right in this clip.

Trump on fertilizer: A lot comes in from Canada and so we will end up putting very severe tariffs on that if we have to because that is the way to bolster it here

Rollins: The president has been very unequivocal in saying we have to figure out why all these input costs are… pic.twitter.com/KU7tP5H4YR

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2025

That’s right. While the administration is pointing fingers at Joe Biden, Trump’s own policies are primarily to blame for those massive cost increases.

On the one hand, there are his tariffs, which have forced farmers to pay more for fertilizer coming from abroad, for farm equipment, and spare parts.

For example, Canada, which has been one of the president’s main targets in the global trade war he initiated, supplies the US with the vast majority of the potash required for potassium-based fertilizers. And, since it is the importing companies (and, ultimately, their customers) who are paying for these tariffs, and not foreign businesses or government, as Trump keeps insisting, prices in the US are going up.

To be honest, we still don’t know whether the president just doesn’t understand how this works or if he is lying to the American people.

After today’s event, we actually think it may be the former because, in response to a question of what to do about the high share of fertilizer coming in from Canada, he suggested that he would place “very severe tariffs on that if we have to.”

That, of course, would send prices even higher.

In any case, Trump now hopes that farmers, who voted for him in overwhelming numbers, will be grateful that he will put some of the tariff money that US businesses and consumers pay back into their pockets.

Obviously, the easiest solution to bring down prices would be to eliminate those import taxes.

Unfortunately for US farmers, there is no easy fix to address their soaring labor costs.

And, once again, Trump is to blame.

According to his own Department of Labor, the president’s wide-ranging deportation program is having a devastating impact on the agricultural sector.

“The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for US consumers,” DOL wrote in an obscure Federal Register entry earlier this year.

To put it plainly, US farmers rely on the cheap labor of undocumented immigrants to put food on the tables of American families at a reasonable cost.

So, there you have it, Secretary Rollins. We have unraveled this conundrum for you.

Now all you have to do is to explain to your boss that he needs to reverse his two core policy initiatives.