At the Purfeerst farm in southern Minnesota, the soybean harvest just wrapped up for the season. The silver grain bins are full of about 100,000 bushels of soybeans, which grab about $10 a piece.
This year, though, the fate of the soybeans, and the people whose livelihoods depend on selling them, is up in the air: America’s soybean farmers are stuck in the middle of a trade war between the US and China, the biggest purchaser of soybean exports, used to feed China’s pigs.
“We are gonna have to find a home for them soybeans some time soon,” said Matt Purfeerst, a fifth-generation farmer on the family’s land. “They won’t stay in our bins for ever.”
No other country comes close to purchasing as many American soybeans as China – last year, it was more than $12bn worth. This year, the country has not purchased a single dollar’s worth, cutting off the country that makes up about half of US soybean exports.
While Trump has said he intends some sort of payment to go to soybean farmers hurt by tariffs, an announcement of a specific plan is on hold while the government is shut down. He said in a Truth Social post last week that he would be meeting with the Chinese president soon and “soybeans will be a major topic of discussion”.
The White House cast blame on Democrats for the government shutdown for the delay in a response to the Guardian on Wednesday, erroneously claiming they were prioritizing healthcare for migrants over farmers.
“President Trump, [Treasury] Secretary [Scott] Bessent, and [Agriculture] Secretary [Brooke] Rollins are always in touch about the needs of our farmers, who played a crucial role in the president’s November victory,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress have stalled progress on this issue with their prolonged shutdown to serve illegal immigrants instead of America’s farmers. No decisions have been made, but we look forward to sharing good news soon.”
Purfeerst’s family farm grows soybeans and corn, and has some beef cattle. The job is a round-the-clock combination of engineering, business, manual labor, environmental science. And it’s increasingly hard for family farms to make it. Costs for propane, fertilizer and seed have gone up, he said, and the prices for the goods they are selling don’t make up for the increased costs.
Soybean farmers have become the “poster child out there right now of how this one particular segment’s getting hurt”, he said. The farm recently welcomed the Democratic US senator Amy Klobuchar for a visit to talk about how the tariffs were playing out, but Purfeerst said political affiliations didn’t matter.
“Only 1% of the population is even involved in [agriculture] any more,” he said. “And what gets really challenging is this perception of ag out there, whether it’s on tariffs and prices or environmental issues, farmers kind of seem to be the crosshairs of a lot of it.”
Farming areas voted for Trump in 2024, as did much of rural America. One analysis, by Investigate Midwest, showed Trump growing his support among farming-dependent counties in 2024 despite a trade war during his first term that negatively affected farmers.
“I’m not gonna get into who I voted for particularly, but I would just have to say, at the time, you got to make decisions who you think is going to be the best leader of the country, and go on with life,” Purfeerst said. “And in four years, you get to vote again. That’s the beauty of our society. It’s not an 80-year regime. It’s a four-year cycle. It’s hard to say what’s gonna come about. I mean, everyone’s got their pros and cons.”
Purfeerst has options for his soybeans: because of his farm’s location, he can sell domestically to soybean crush facilities in nearby towns, sell on the rail market, or sell in Minneapolis and put product on barges down the Mississippi River. Other soybean farmers, especially those in more remote parts of the midwest where soybeans are mostly produced, aren’t as lucky.
Stories from all parts of the country where soybeans are grown have surfaced in recent weeks – in Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska, Indiana, the Dakotas. Farmers face higher costs for inputs like fertilizer and equipment. They rely on China as a purchaser. Soybeans sitting in bins too long is subject to weather and pests. The prices fluctuate, so it’s a gamble to hold on to it that sometimes can pay off, or sometimes lose money.
“Let’s say tomorrow we get a trade deal with China, and it’s favorable to soybeans. All of a sudden you might see this market jump from $10 to $12 in three, four days,” Purfeerst said. “So it makes it extremely challenging from a risk management standpoint of: when do you market your crop, and how many eggs do you put in that basket? The potential is $12, but if we don’t get a trade deal, it could go to $9 … There’s a huge volatility in soybeans.”
The soybean industry has been warning for months that China’s exit from the market would be devastating, calling on the Trump administration to come up with a trade deal that spares farmers. The American Soybean Association wrote a letter to Trump in August, saying the country’s soybean farmers were “standing at a trade and financial precipice” and “cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute with our largest customer”.
Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, declared the first week of October as soybean week, saying in the announcement that “our soybean farmers are confronting a crisis they haven’t seen since the 1980s”.
“They’ve produced a bumper crop this year, just to find out they have nowhere to sell their harvest thanks to Trump’s trade policies,” Walz said. “Minnesota’s got the best beans in the world – I encourage Minnesotans to stand with our farmers and continue to advocate for federal trade reform.”
It’s not the first time a Trump trade plan has hurt soybean farmers: in 2018, a trade war led to significant reductions in soybean exports to China. Since then, the market has rebounded, though China has ramped up soybean purchases from Brazil and Argentina, stockpiling imports earlier this year.
Republican lawmakers have said they are sympathetic to the farmers and want to find a way to help them. James Comer, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, said this week that soybean farmers were not to blame for the problem they are facing.
“They planted that crop assuming that those foreign markets were going to be there,” Comer said in a recent TV appearance. “I think we need to do something to help the soybean farmers.”
A bailout is “really just a Band-Aid”, though it’s one that many farmers would welcome as they are getting squeezed right now, Purfeerst said. Most farmers would prefer an open market, without tariffs, for their products, letting the market dictate prices. They don’t want the trade war now to affect a long-term relationship that makes up a significant chunk of market share. There also should be more emphasis put on increasing domestic uses of soybeans, though a long-range plan like that won’t help the farmers who are stuck right now, he said.
“There’s farms that are struggling to make money on soybean acres, and you’ve got to remember: whatever payment we’re getting, whatever that dollar amount might be, if we get anything, it’s not just going in our back pocket,” he said. “We’ve got a fertilizer bill. We’ve got to pay the seed bill. There’s a lot of payments. So really, that money might be in the farmer’s hands for a month, until it gets spent on inputs for next year.”
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