Brussels is about to get another reminder that tractors don’t run on promises.

Despite a flood of legislative goodies and concessions, some 10,000 farmers from all 27 EU countries are expected to descend on the EU quarter for what the bloc’s main farm lobby Copa-Cogeca says will be the biggest farm protests Brussels has seen this century. Tractors are expected. Speeches are planned. As for manure or burning hay? That, apparently, depends on who shows up.

“We’ve told everyone to behave,” said Peter Meedendorp, the head of Europe’s young farmers group CEJA. “But maybe the group from northern France — they are more radical — we can’t say what they’ll do.”

Even the EU’s agriculture commissioner admits the protest defies a single explanation.

Some farmers are coming over trade. Others over the next EU budget. Others over animal diseases or green rules. 

“It’s difficult to say they are coming for one or the other reason,” Christophe Hansen told POLITICO. “There are several reasons — and they are not the same depending on where the farmers are coming from.”

That helps explain why farmers are back in Brussels — again — even as the European Commission insists it has bent over backward to meet their demands. From shielding farm payments in the next EU budget, to rewriting pesticide rules and slowing down trade deals, Brussels says it’s trying. Farmers say it’s still not enough.

Below, we break down the main grievances driving Thursday’s march — and rate both the EU’s response and the farmers’ level of anger using our highly scientific pen-and-poop scale: Five pens for a robust policy response; a five-manure rating for peak anger. 

Budget anxiety

The complaint: Farmers fear their slice of the EU budget will be trimmed to fund other priorities.

EU answer: Keeping roughly €300 billion in EU payments flowing to farmers after 2027.

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As Brussels braces for a brutal fight over the next EU budget, agriculture has — for the most part — escaped the axe. While other policy areas are being told to expect trade-offs, farming has won rare protections.

Hansen has locked in long-term guarantees for direct payments to farmers and added new targets aimed at keeping rural areas economically viable, just months after the proposal was unveiled. Officials note no other sector enjoys that kind of treatment.

It didn’t come easily. The Commission’s budget officials had eyed agriculture as one of the few pots big enough to help bankroll other, more strategic priorities. Hansen drew the line. Farmers, however, say that after decades of the Common Agricultural Policy being a given, guarantees on paper don’t settle what their share of the EU budget will look like once negotiations begin in earnest.

Trade tensions

The complaint: Free-trade deals flooding the EU market with unfair foreign competition. 

EU answer: Refusing to adopt the Mercosur trade agreement until backstops are inked into law — potentially delaying the whole deal.

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The Commission is determined to sign a deal with the Mercosur countries by the end of the year that would make it easier for a limited amount of beef, poultry and other agricultural goods to enter the bloc. That’s sparking outrage among farmers in major producing countries like France and Poland.

The EU is in the process of finalizing “safeguard” measures to protect these sectors that could be activated if prices or import volumes change drastically as a result of the agreement — but farmers aren’t convinced. 

“It’s the cumulative effect,” said Francie Gorman, president of the Irish Farmers’ Association who is driving his tractor to Brussels all the way from Dublin. “Every time a trade deal is done, it seems to us like farming becomes a bargaining chip and that farmers are sold out.”

Sure enough, the farmers’ trade demands go beyond stopping the Mercosur agreement. They want other trading partners to be forced to meet EU production standards to export their products to the bloc, and are calling for “balanced” imports from Ukraine to avoid undercutting producers within the bloc.

Environmental rules

The complaint: EU regulations make life more difficult for Europeans farmers, especially compared with the competition abroad.

EU answer: Environment tape-cutting and new rules making it easier to access pesticides in Europe and harder to use them abroad.

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No one can say the Commission isn’t trying to win over farmers on pesticides. Over the past week, they’ve announced bills that would introduce unlimited approvals for many pesticides and give farmers an extra year to phase out toxic substances.

“I appreciate they are making necessary steps,” said Meedendorp, conceding that yes, on some issues, the Commission is doubling over backward to appease farm groups. But “being happy on one file … doesn’t mean we don’t have other problems.”

A slew of proposals on trade, particularly a plan that would essentially force farmers in third countries to stop using pesticides banned in the EU, are also a play to even the field for European farmers. 

Those too are welcome, though farmers are skeptical that border checks will actually stop imports of, say, Brazilian sugar beets grown with neonicotinoids. 

And they argue the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism for fertilizers, set to go into force on Jan. 1, should be postponed because of its “drastic impact” on fertilizer prices. 

Other Commission efforts have fallen flat. The farm lobby Copa-Cogeca dismissed a recent environmental simplification bill as only “cosmetic changes.”

National grievances 

The complaint: In France, par exemple, they’re culling the cows to fight the spread of disease. 

EU answer: Paris is responding to lumpy skin disease by taking an even harder line against Mercosur.

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French farmers are among the fiercest opponents of Mercosur. But like most in the tractor convoy, they’ve got plenty of ire for their own capital. 

Paris is fighting the spread of lumpy skin disease, a cattle plague that spreads rapidly and causes major production losses, by mandating the systematic culling of infected herds.

In opposition to that protocol, several French farmers — who argue that only infected animals, not entire herds, should be culled — have once again begun blocking highways with their tractors to draw public attention. The movement has been driven by the hard-line Coordination Rurale, the country’s second-largest farmers’ union, which is often associated with the far right. The largest union, the FNSEA, has also warned that protests would become “much more significant” if the Mercosur trade deal is signed.

Wary of a prolonged standoff with a profession that enjoys broad public sympathy, the government has sought to show it is working around the clock to bring the situation under control. In addition to pushing to postpone Mercosur, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is holding daily meetings to address the lumpy skin disease outbreak and has made the rapid delivery of vaccines to farms across France a top priority.

General discontent 

The complaint: It’s a hard life for farmers and EU is making it worse

EU answer: Sympathy, simplification pledges and tweaks around the edges.

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For many farmers, Thursday’s protest isn’t really about one regulation or one trade deal. It’s about everything.

It’s about 14-hour days, seven days a week. About animals that don’t care if it’s a weekend or a holiday. About paperwork done late at night, after the milking is finished, written in a language that can feel like it comes from another planet. About being told to “diversify” or “innovate” while barely breaking even.

It’s about isolation. Rural communities emptying out. Neighbors retiring with no one to take over. Mental health strains that Brussels rarely talks about — and struggles farmers say few outsiders understand.

It’s also about money. Farmers are price-takers in global markets they don’t control, squeezed between supermarket buying power, volatile commodity prices and rising costs for fuel, fertilizer and feed. When prices spike, the gains rarely reach the farm. When they crash, farmers absorb the hit.

Then come the animal diseases. The forced culls. The climate blame. And the feeling that decisions shaping livelihoods are taken far away, by people who have never set foot in a barn. That anger hardens into resentment.

This is the one grievance Brussels can’t legislate away. And it’s why, even when the Commission bends, farmers keep coming back.