American farmers are confronting a multi-front crisis, as trade policies, immigration crackdowns, weather shocks, and rising costs combine to push an already vulnerable sector into deeper distress. The impacts are being felt most acutely by soybean growers, whose dependence on Chinese markets has left them reeling in the wake of retaliatory tariffs, while labor shortages are crippling dairy and crop operations. Despite mounting hardships, many farmers remain reluctant to abandon their political loyalty to President Donald Trump, even as their livelihoods hang in the balance.
For soybean producers, the collapse of exports to China has been devastating. Before the trade war, about a quarter of the nation’s soybeans were exported there, with China consuming 61 percent of soybeans produced worldwide. Now, that market has all but disappeared. “We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61 percent of soybeans produced worldwide,” said Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association. “Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.”
Ragland described the situation as an existential threat for growers across the country. “It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25 percent of our total sales is currently missing. And right now we are not competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs that are in place. Our prices are about 20 percent higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere because they can find a better value,” he said. “And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering. They are 500,000 of us that produce soybeans, and we desperately need markets, and we need opportunity and a leveled playing field.” He added: “There’s an artificial barrier that is built with these tariffs that makes us not be competitive.”
The economic pain is not limited to soybeans. Stefan Maupin, executive director of the Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council, likened the crisis to “death by a thousand cuts.” He warned that “we’re in a significant and desperate situation where… none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit. They don’t even break even.” He pointed to Congress’s failure to pass a new Farm Bill since 2018 as leaving growers exposed: “we do not have a workable safety net program when things like this happen in our economy.” Even well-managed farms are finding themselves powerless. Farmers, Maupin said, “have done everything right, they’ve managed their finances well, they have put in a good crop… but they cannot change the weather, they cannot change the economy, they cannot change the markets. The weather is in the control of a higher power, and the economy and the markets are in control of Washington, D.C.”
In Tennessee, fifth-generation farmer Alan Meadows described how unpredictable weather compounded by tariffs and inflation created a disastrous season. “This has been a really tough year for us,” he said. “It started off really good. We were in the field in late March, which is early for us. But then the wheels came off, so to speak, pretty quick.” Flooding in April was followed by a dry summer, while higher supply costs piled on. “So much of what has happened and what’s going on here is totally out of our control,” Meadows said. “We just want a free, fair, and open market where we can sell our goods… as competitively as anybody else around the world. And we do feel that we produce a superior product here in the United States, and we just need to have the markets.”
The toll is stark. Bloomberg reported in July that farmer small-business bankruptcies have reached a five-year high. Fertilizer costs have soared due in part to trade disputes with Canada, raising the price of potash. Equipment costs have also climbed. Christopher Wolf, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, underscored the global scale: “China is just so big that when they buy things, it matters – and when they don’t, it matters.”
At the same time, immigration policies have cut deeply into the agricultural workforce. Between March and July, farm labor dropped by 155,000—about 7 percent. Pew Research Center data shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July. Dairy farmers in Pennsylvania say they are unable to find the workers they need. “The whole thing is screwed up,” said John Painter, a dairy farmer and three-time Trump voter. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”
Tim Wood, another Pennsylvania dairy farmer and a member of the state’s Farm Bureau board of directors, was blunt about the consequences: “People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked.” Charlie Porter, who chairs the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s Ag Labor and Safety Committee, pointed to the climate of fear facing immigrant workers. “It’s a shame you have hard-working people who need labor, and a group of people who are willing to work, and they have to look over their shoulder like they’re criminals—they’re not.”
Painter admitted his disillusionment with the administration’s policies. “It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”
Despite this mounting distress, loyalty to Trump remains strong among many farmers. In Iowa, 65-year-old grain and hog farmer Tim Maxwell explained why he is holding on. “Our yields, crops, and weather are pretty good—but our [interest from] markets right now is on a low,” he said. “I’m going to be patient. I believe in our president.” But he also drew a line: “We’re giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results. I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off.”
Farmers like Maxwell echo a broader pattern of “selective blame attribution” described by political scientists: enduring loyalty despite economic harm, rooted in decades of rural identity formation and partisan realignment. As one South Dakota farmer, Gil Gullickson, observed, “A lot of people say he’s just using tariffs as a bargaining chip, as a bluff. But I can say: history proves that tariffs don’t end well.”
Yet Trump and his allies continue to assure farmers that relief is coming. Over the summer, the administration expanded federal subsidies for farmers by $60 billion and increased funding for crop insurance. Trump himself declared in his annual speech to Congress: “Our farmers are going to have a field day… to our farmers, have a lot of fun, I love you.” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller praised the approach: “We finally have an administration that is prioritising farmers and ranchers. They advocate for farmers, challenge China … and ensure America’s producers are receiving fair treatment.”
For many in rural America, the wager is that temporary hardship will be offset by long-term gain. But others fear permanent damage as supply chains shift away from the United States. Michael Langemeier, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, warned that “your trading partner doesn’t know exactly what your position’s going to be next year, because it seems like we’re changing the goalposts. That is a problem.”
For soybean growers like Ragland, the clock is already running out. With no sales on the books for the current crop, the fear is that Chinese buyers will not return even if tariffs are lifted. “U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial precipice,” he wrote in a letter to the White House.
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