Linden, North Carolina

After two tours of duty in Iraq, one as a bomb disposal specialist, Jim Hartman took up beekeeping as therapy for his PTSD. These days he runs a 22-acre honey farm with more than 30 hives. In a nod to simpler times, his farm has a self-serve store, where customers can pay for raw local honey by dropping cash in a box. In 2024, Hartman was named North Carolina Small Farmer of the Year.

This year, though, Hartman has “one eye on his bees and the other on his bank account,” as reporter Randi Kaye put it in a CNN story about him. Hartman took a “massive hit,” he told Kaye, after the Trump administration abruptly cancelled a USDA program that supplied honey to schools and food banks. The program had been “a major source of reliable revenue” for many local farmers, Hartman said, estimating that its loss would cost him “around $150,000 a year,” or about half his annual revenue. He also expressed agitation over the administration’s flip-flopping tariff policies and their impact on the cost of supplies and equipment. What with one thing and another, Hartman said, he would have to delay any improvements or new hires indefinitely.

“This has fallen on the backs of small farmers,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “The people he’s appointed and the way they’re going about things, it’s not OK.”

A lifelong Republican, Hartman voted for Donald Trump in 2024, as he had twice before. But “I never thought I was going to lose this much money this fast,” he said on CNN. When Kaye asked him how he felt about his vote in retrospect, Hartman replied: “I feel like perhaps I should have considered some other options.”