The Ants Are Getting Crushed

Sledge Taylor is seventy-three years old and he is walking his corn in the morning, just outside Como, Mississippi, in the rich black alluvium of Panola County — where the river built the dirt over thousands of years out of sheer dumb patience, a sediment cathedral one floodplain at a time. And now a man who has done this exact walk for fifty-three consecutive springs is looking at his stalks at the V3 stage, the V5 stage, the precise vegetative window when the corn wants the nitrogen and the farmer wants to give it to him and the steel disk wants to slice the soil twenty inches at a clip and bury the fertilizer between the rows. And Sledge Taylor is telling a reporter from NPR that he is not going to do it this year. Because the nitrogen costs too much. Because the corn is worth too little. Because a war thousands of miles away has shut the Strait of Hormuz and roughly one-third of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer with it.

Anyway.

The water towers in this part of Mississippi wear the family names. There is one in the town of Sledge with the word SLEDGE in flaking white paint — named after WD Sledge, great-great-grandfather of the man who can no longer afford to fertilize his own corn. The town is named after the family. The family is one bad year from putting the dirt up for lease. This is what we now mean when we say America First.

The economics are simple, if you have the stomach to do them. Anthony Bland is fifty-eight and farms 2,000 acres of rice and soybeans a few miles down the road, on land WD Sledge once owned, and Anthony Bland keeps a small notebook in his back pocket because he is the kind of man who still writes things down with a pencil. Last year his thirty-five tons of fertilizer cost sixteen thousand dollars. This year the same thirty-five tons costs twenty-six thousand. Diesel is up sixty percent in the last forty-five days — not the last year, not the last quarter, the last forty-five days — because the planet’s tankers cannot transit a strait that the United States and Israel are currently making impassable. This is, in fairness, a very effective form of foreign policy. It is also a very effective form of bankruptcy for a man who irrigates his fields with diesel-powered pumps because the Mississippi Delta is in a record-breaking drought and the rain has not arrived and may not arrive until the corn is already dead.

A note to the planners. If you intend to wage a forever-war in the Middle East, and a tariff war on every continent simultaneously, while gutting the USDA programs that historically kept Black farmers solvent, while presiding over a drought — you might want to consider that there is a finite supply of patience among the men who actually grow the food. Sir, this is a country. Allegedly.

Sledge Taylor is a lifelong Republican. He voted for Donald J. Trump in 2024. He told a reporter on the record that his patience is “wearing thin,” which is the polite Mississippi way of saying he is one diesel invoice away from a state of full-spectrum biblical wrath. The administration sent him a check from the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program — a twelve-billion-dollar one-time payment dressed up like a balm and priced like an insult — and the check covered about twenty percent of what he lost last year. Anthony Bland got one too, which covered roughly a quarter of his tariff losses. The administration says it has paid out over thirty billion dollars in ad hoc assistance to farmers since January 2025, which is a fascinating sentence when you remember that the trade war is the reason the assistance is necessary. We broke the man’s leg, then sold him a cane at retail, then declared ourselves a friend of the patient.

Or, as Taylor put it — and I would commit a small federal crime to have been the man who said this on tape:

If somebody took $100 out of my pocket and then turned around and gave me $20 back, patted me on the back and said they were my friend, I’m not really sure I would agree.

China has stopped buying American soybeans. Rice exports to Latin America have cratered. Cotton has bottomed out. The corn is sitting in elevators waiting for a customer who is not going to show up — because, as Taylor put it, the planet has decided we are an unreliable supplier. A verdict, if I am being honest, that is hard to argue with given that this country has spent the last year applying tariffs the way a drunk applies pepper: indiscriminately, and to excess. “We have lost customers forever,” Taylor said. “They will never come back.” This is not a man being dramatic. This is a man with a calculator.

Anthony Bland did not vote for Trump. He has a more direct critique. He said: “I just have a problem with the way they’re treating anybody that doesn’t look like him.” Asked whether he will plant again next year, he quoted the definition of insanity — doing the same thing and expecting a different result — and added that with tariffs on top of the war, the result is not going to get any better. He may stop. He may lease the land. The cotton fields his family has worked since the cotton fields were the cotton fields are at the end of a notebook he carries in his back pocket, totted up in pencil. The math does not add up.

Both men oppose the war. Both men are doing what their fathers did. Neither knows whether they will do it again next spring.

Sledge Taylor stood in his V3-V5 corn at dawn last Friday and offered the only verdict that matters. There is, he said, an old African proverb. When elephants fight, it’s the ants that get crushed. The ants are getting crushed.

The thing about this proverb, in its full and unedited form, is that the elephants do not notice. They never do. They are elephants. They are too large to notice the dust — and the dust, in this case, is the farm belt of the United States Department of Agriculture, and the dust will not stay dust forever. Eventually it blows up into the elephant’s eyes. Eventually it gets into the lungs. Eventually the elephant is choking on the country it claimed to be saving and wondering why nobody warned it.

We are warning it. We are filing this dispatch from Como, Mississippi, where a seventy-three-year-old man with corn in two stages of vegetative development is doing what his father, and his father’s father, did. But for the last time. The town is named Sledge. Soon it will be a hyphen on a map.

The ants are getting crushed. The ants vote. The ants will remember.