Rural America is getting a bailout, but not from Trump—billionaires are riding to the rescue
Rural America gets a bailout.
Billionaires are increasingly stepping in to fill gaps in services, education and opportunities that many small towns say have been ignored for years. While Washington remains deadlocked over how to revitalize areas left behind by industrial and demographic change, a growing class of wealthy donors is quietly reshaping the rural economic future with nine-figure checks and thousands of acres of land.
Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor, who turned Taylor’s company into a printing empire and became his state’s richest resident, is now redirecting a large slice of his wealth to the rural communities where he grew up. The 84-year-old former dairy farmer, from outside Comfrey, Minn. (population 376 as of 2024), is transferring farmland and securities worth approximately $100 million to the Taylor Family Farms Foundation, with a specific mandate to support rural areas of Minnesota and Iowa.
Rather than providing a one-time cash infusion, Taylor’s gift is designed to generate income for years, building on the 2023 transfer of about $173 million of farmland that already funds grants through regional nonprofit partners. The move is rooted in his upbringing in southern Minnesota, where he farmed and raised chickens, and a desire to “make a positive impact on the lives of others in the area he loved so much,” Taylor said in a statement to the newspaper. observer.
Rural Billionaire Wave
Taylor is part of a broader pattern in which super-rich donors are clearly focusing on small towns and rural America rather than the big-city universities and museums that have long dominated philanthropy. investment banker Byron Trout, who grew up in Union, Missouri, has pledged $150 million to a network of universities to boost student enrollment in rural areas, a payment that has already helped boost applications by 20%.
Likewise, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has turned her attention to rural education, donating $36 million to North Carolina institutions such as Robeson Community College and Bladen Community College to advance opportunities in some of the poorest counties in the country. Together, these gifts signal an acknowledgment by the billionaires that the country’s economic and political fault lines increasingly run between thriving metros and struggling rural areas — and that private money can move faster than federal policy.
Politics, power and dependency
The surge in billionaire interest comes as rural voters remain a key political base for Trump, whose “forgotten men and women” rhetoric helped propel him back to the White House but has not translated into a comprehensive federal plan to revitalize America’s small towns. In this vacuum, philanthropists like Taylor, Trout, and Scott write their own rural policy agendas through foundations and grantmaking, deciding which cities get ambulances, which fire departments get radios, and which students get a chance to attend college.
The Trump administration announced a $12 billion bailout for farmers in the wake of eliminating the tariff regime, especially for soybeans. Sometime in 2025, when Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Besent announced their support for his ally Javier Miley in Argentina, China reduced its purchases of US soybeans to zero and began buying them from Argentina instead. After the Trump-Xi summit, China resumed purchasing soybeans, and Argentina recently repaid its entire $20 billion credit line. Caleb Ragland, a Kentucky soybean farmer, told The Associated Press in early January that Trump’s aid to farmers was “a bandage on a deep wound. We need competition and opportunity in the market to make our future brighter.”
For this story,luckJournalists have used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publication.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
2026-01-14 22:20:00
