US farmers on the brink as Trump’s trade war bites
It’s Trump-supporting territory but soybean growers are in crisis – sorely tested as the President’s tariffs against Beijing trigger foreclosures, industry exits and suicides.
Donald Trump’s trade war with China has contributed to the worst financial crisis in 40 years for US farming communities, which are sounding the alarm on growing foreclosures, mediations and even suicides. Many are openly contemplating leaving the industry.
Soybean farmers have been on the frontline as Beijing has retaliated against the US President’s reciprocal tariffs this year by pulling purchases of American soybeans from May and imposing prohibitive tariffs – a move that generated devastating uncertainty in rural communities.
Although a tentative trade truce has been reached, American soybean farmers who have spoken to The Australian do not trust Beijing to uphold its end of the bargain by following through on its promise to purchase a further 12 million tonnes of soybeans by the end of the season.
Farmers’ demands of Washington include a government assistance package to growers as a temporary lifeline and for greater efforts to be made to open up new markets, reducing reliance on China and underwriting future durability.
Bob Worth, 73, a third-generation soybean and corn producer who farms 2000 acres (about 809ha) in Lake Benton in western Minnesota, near the South Dakota border, tells The Australian that “foreclosures are going up in agriculture”.
“It’s probably five, six in our area,” he says. “I mean, it’s a lot.
“And we can’t get any young farmers to come back to start this. That’s a tough thing. I’m 73 years old and I really should think about retirement, but there’s no young farmers to come and take my spot. My son is, but sometimes you can’t farm 2000 acres by yourself.”
US Department of Agriculture figures show that China made up slightly more than half the total $US24.47bn export value for US soybeans in 2024, but many rural farmers are reluctant to blame the Trump administration for the loss of their biggest customer – arguing the US trade deficit needs to be addressed.
They point to high inflation under the Biden administration and express a sense of alienation at the Democrats’ shift to the progressive left, accusing the party of turning its back on the country’s agricultural communities.
Worth – who this year produced his 55th crop – warns that soybean producers are facing their worst conditions since the farming crisis of the mid-1980s when spiralling interest rates and lost export markets triggered a collapse in grain prices and farm values.
“Everything is leading up to the 80s all over again,” he says.
A director with the American Soybean Association, Worth notes that financial mediations – where a farmer and a lender “come in and sit down and work out if they can figure out a way to make your farming operation possible enough that the banks will be happy” – have skyrocketed in Minnesota.
“We used to have maybe, I don’t know, five mediations, maybe, a month,” he says. “We’re going from five to 150 in a blink of an eye. And it’s all because everybody is in financial trouble, even the old farmers like me.”
Ryan Mackenthun, a fifth-generation farmer who produces soybeans and corn on about 890ha of land in Brownton, Minnesota, about 100km west of Minneapolis, says he was “nervous going into the election” in 2024.
“We knew tariffs were on the agenda under President Trump,” he says. “Obviously, it was frustrating because I knew the reciprocal tariffs were going to be targeted at me. We saw what the tariffs did in 2018-19. I can vividly remember it. I believe that we had $US10.89 soybeans on the Chicago Board of Trade when the tariffs were announced. And I think within a month – I could pull my phone out and show you a chart – I think within a month we were down near to $US8.”
Pressed on whether political sentiment in rural America has shifted against the Trump administration because of trade tensions, Mackenthun says there is a “sense of optimism” now that a trade deal has been reached with Beijing.
However, he says the economic model underpinning many rural farming operations has become increasingly difficult to sustain.
“I’m going to have to seriously think about whether I even want to continue farming,” Mackenthun says. “Because if it can’t be profitable, why would I continue? If I don’t have the next generation who wants to farm, then why would I continue losing money when I could just sell everything? If we don’t see profitability in farming, the next generation ain’t going to stick around.”
Worth strongly backs Trump’s concerns about the long-term US trade deficit, arguing that fixing it has been an overdue national objective and that chronic trade imbalances – including with China – have been harmful to America. Still, he recognises the correction period will be painful.
“Our balance of trade in the United States has been terrible for many, many years. And something had to get done. It’s just a bad time to have it done now when our economics is so bad in agriculture. I mean, before the tariffs, they weren’t good. And tariffs just made it worse.”
Expressing a personal view, Worth says he was a Democrat supporter until about 10 to 15 years ago but warns the party has moved “much further left, and they kind of forgot about agriculture”.
In September, Newsweek published polling by ActiVote showing Trump’s net approval rating among rural Americans, one of his key voting blocs, had declined from +22 percentage points in August to +14 percentage points in September – still in positive territory but on a downward trajectory. A June report on the 2024 election by the Pew Research Centre found that Trump had won voters living in rural areas by 40 points (69 per cent to 29 per cent) – a higher margin than in 2020 or 2016 – pointing to a growing political divide with urban areas.
Former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison, founder of the Dirt Road Democrats PAC, is deeply concerned about ensuring the party manages to claw back support outside major metropolitan centres across the US.
On December 1, Harrison took to social media urging the party to “compete everywhere”, arguing “we must have a long-term strategic plan to re-engage and eventually win back rural communities”.
This week Harrison, who unsuccessfully challenged Republican Lindsey Graham for his South Carolina Senate seat in 2020, told Puck News – an insider political and media digital outlet – that “for the longest time, Democrats had a foothold in rural America … Right now we’re seeing a massive number of bankruptcies with farmers in this country under Republican control. Many family farms are going under like we have never seen before. These folks aren’t getting the attention and the resources that they need. So, what we have to do is talk with the folks in these communities.”
In Minnesota, snow has already started to fall and conditions are turning bitterly cold. But many farmers have held on to large parts of their harvest because of the depressed soybean price caused by the withdrawal of Chinese demand. The hope is that the fragile trade truce and resumption of Chinese purchases of US soybeans will push prices up again and allow farmers to limit their losses or even eke out a small profit, although many were forced to sell at the end of harvest at a substantial loss.
Mackenthun – vice-president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association – tells The Australian he sold about two-thirds of his soybean crop at the end of September for about $US9.20 a bushel, well below his break-even mark, which he puts at about $US12.50.
He put the final third of his crop in storage hoping for a trade deal with Beijing and a rebound in the soybean price. Pointing to a series of historical charts, he says that usually, once the price hits $US11, they “fly right through 11 (dollars) and go into the 12s”.
But some farmers are doubtful that China will follow through and purchase the 12 million tonnes of soybeans it promised under the deal reached between Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea at the end of October.
Worth is particularly sceptical, telling The Australian: “I don’t have any confidence. We’ve dealt with China for almost 20 years. And they have done this a lot. They will sign a contract, a purchase agreement, that they’re going to buy so many beans, and they’ll just cancel the contract. They will just do it. That’s just the way they are. So, yeah, I don’t have confidence in them to get it done.”
He says the hit to profitability on soybeans this year has been inflicted by a range of factors, but the key one has been the uncertainty caused by the withdrawal of the Chinese market. This caused the local grain elevators to panic and slash what they normally would pay farmers by an extra dollar or more per bushel.
This is referred to as “basis” – the amount the elevators shave off the futures price set by the Chicago Board of Trade to cover the long haul to the coast, their own margin and the uncertainty of whether a ship will take the beans to foreign markets.
“Normally the basis for soybeans for us is anywhere from US40c to US50c a bushel. This year they were anywhere from $US1 to $US2 a bushel,” Worth says. “It was the basis that really hurt us because of the uncertainty of where the elevators could deliver the grain, because I’m on the western side of Minnesota and all our grain gets shipped to the west coast and put on vessels to China, The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam. I’m hoping our government will look for other buyers in this world to buy our soybeans, another country will step up so we don’t have to rely 100 per cent on China.
“Because China has done this before. They will sign a contract that they’re going to buy so many million metric tonnes, and they’ll just cancel it.”
Worth says he sold all his soybeans at harvest and received a cash price of about $US9.30 a bushel at the elevator and then used options to add another US80c – netting just over $US10 a bushel.
“It’s still a loss,” he says.
In November, Trump expressed hope China would “speed up” its purchases of US soybeans and raised the subject with Xi directly in their phone call at the end of the month.
But Worth warns that China is only one side of the story and that higher input costs for farming equipment and fertiliser have been just as devastating in contributing to the financial crisis in rural America.
“You’ve got to put them both side-by-side,” Worth says. “They’re equal. The high input costs … seed, fertiliser, chemicals, interest rates, all this stuff has gone up so much. And then the tariffs on top of it.
“I mean, it’s a double whammy. But they’re equal. I mean, the tariffs, if we didn’t have the high input costs, we could probably absorb the tariff. We can’t absorb both.”
Mackenthun says he took steps to mitigate rising input costs by forming a six-member equipment co-operative back in 2018 with his two neighbouring farms, covering a total of about 1820ha, in which each farmer owned one major piece of machinery.
“I don’t own any tillage equipment,” he says. “That’s one of the other farms’ task in our group. And I don’t own a corn planter. That’s another farm’s task. So, I do the harvesting with the semis, the crop protection with the sprayer, you know, and we plant the soybeans.
“I also have the combines for the harvest.”
He says the cost of a combine has “nearly doubled in the last 10 years” and now can now set back a farmer by up to $US800,000 to $US1m ($1.5m).
Writing for The Washington Post at the end of November, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, argued that Trump’s policies had “given Democrats a huge opening” to make gains in rural communities.
“His tariffs are jacking up prices across the board – for no reason,” Beshear says. In addition, Beshear argues the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is “a slap in the face to rural America” because its healthcare cuts will hurt smaller towns disproportionately and set back productivity. “All of that moves the American Dream even further out of reach,” he says. “By focusing on reviving it, Democrats can win back voters who have been leaving the party in droves.”
Some steps are already being taken. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairwoman Suzan DelBene has unveiled the Our Power, Our Country initiative aimed at raising an eight-figure sum to be spent on efforts aimed at winning back Asian, Latino, black and rural voters who felt abandoned by the party leading into the 2026 midterms.
Pressed on the conditions for farmers across the coming years, Worth says it “does not look good at all” and that he hopes the administration understands that “we could very easily lose a lot more farmers, and we can’t afford to lose more farmers”.
He warns that the period of financial hardship already has ignited a mental health crisis in rural America, noting “suicide is the No. 1 cause of death in agriculture”.
Worth says three of his close friends have committed suicide and he encourages those who are struggling to seek help.
“This farm stress and all this is just creating a severe amount of depression (and) suicide,” he says. “And it’s not going down any and it’s getting serious.
“Farmers are very proud people and they don’t want to talk about problems that they’re having. And so they keep it to themselves. And it sometimes costs them their life.”
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