The Foreign Policy of the American Farm

What happens when decisions made for diplomacy decide whether crops sell, ranchers survive, or rural towns disappear.

Scott Brown stood in front of his cattle farm in Arkansas, land his family had worked since the Oklahoma land rush in the early 1800s. He had a month or two left before he would lose everything.

“I’m the one that’s going to lose all this,” Brown said. There was no way to turn a profit anymore.

For decades, farmers in Arkansas sold large amounts of their s…