Many years ago I was the editor of a tiny daily newspaper in Indiana, in the heart of the Farm Belt. I had uncles and cousins nearby who raised corn and soybeans in soil made fertile by millions of years of glacial movement that left rich nutrient deposits. We used to call it the Corn Belt, but U.S. soybean acreage has been increasing for decades, and it has been outpacing corn planting in America in this century.
Which is bad news this year, because soybean farmers are in tough straits thanks to Donald Trump – whom they almost all voted for last year.
Trump warned everybody during the campaign that he was going to wage a trade war –and his biggest target is China, the world’s second-largest economy. So Trump imposed a series of increasing tariffs now totaling 145 percent on Chinese goods, and China responded likewise, with a 125 percent tariff on American products – and, important to this discussion, it is not buying any soybeans from the U.S. – none at all. Last year, China bought one-third of the U.S. soybean crop.
So the impact is huge: Midwest silos are full of soybeans – because there’s too little demand. And farmers lucky enough to sell to other markets are getting about 20 percent less per bushel than last year.
China, meanwhile, is doing just fine, because it has found other suppliers. One, notably, is Argentina, which took advantage of the situation by removing its export tax on grains, to make Argentine soybeans cheaper for Chinese buyers.
And then last week Donald Trump welcomed the president of Argentina to the White House and gave him a $20 billion economic bailout. So, in effect, the Trump administration is making up a financial shortfall in Argentina so Argentine farmers can replace American farmers as suppliers of a foreign market.
Why? Well, Trump likes the style and the right-wing politics of the president of Argentina, Javier Milei; he has been called “the Trump of Latin America.” In fact, Trump likes Milei so much that he threatened to cut off that U.S. aid to Argentina if voters there don’t re-elect Milei later this month.
But think about it: Killing the market for U.S. products and then subsidizing a competitor sounds like a massive double-cross, right? You’d think that might really tick off the farmers of America.
So how do you take care of them if you’re Donald Trump? Why, a federal bailout, of course. The White House is said to be planning to pump $10 billion to $15 billion into farm relief. That’s held up just now, like everything else, by the government shutdown. But once that ends, there apparently will be a push by Republicans in Congress to shovel billions of taxpayer dollars to the Farm Belt.
Funny – the farmers I know aren’t big fans of welfare. But that’s what a bailout would be. And they’re going to need that and more – especially because another effect of this trade war is a slowdown in the economy and continuing inflation: USDA reports that farm labor costs are up 47 percent since 2020, fertilizer is up 37 percent, fuel and oil are up 32 percent and seed prices have risen by 18 percent.
A survey of more than a thousand farmers released last month by the national Corn Growers Association found that nearly half think the U.S. is on the brink of a farm crisis, and two-thirds are more concerned about their farm’s finances than they were a year ago – when Donald Trump was promising them that he’d fix everything if he got back into the White House.
Farmers believed him then. There are 444 counties in the United States designated by the Agriculture Department as “farming-dependent,” and Donald Trump carried all but 11 of them in 2024, winning on average 77.7 percent of the vote in those places. Don’t you imagine at least some of them regret their votes now?
Look, I haven’t lived in the Farm Belt for decades and I’m ordinarily a big supporter of our government taking good care of the people who grow our food. But this Farm Belt crisis is caused by the government and it can be fixed by the government -- by reversing the policies that got us here. So I’d say a message to our representatives in Congress is in order: Don’t support a bailout until the Trump administration reverses course on policies that are turning farmers into welfare recipients.
Rex Smith, the host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
