Brett Neibling leaned against the door of his small office space, facing the array of computers and instruments that controlled several mechanical functions on his farm. The room was little more than an air-conditioned box, with scattered stools and a whiteboard on one wall. One of his farm dogs, a brown Labrador and known menace, idled outside the door.
His roughly 2,500-acre farm in Highland, Kansas, in the northeast corner of the state, functions because of the equipment in this room. A machine to Neibling’s right facilitated movement of harvested crops into specific grain bins, while one to his left controlled the drying of corn, a necessary preparation before it could be sold. The office has another purpose: It is where Neibling calculates how to keep his family-run farm afloat.
Soybean farmers have been hit particularly hard during President Donald Trump’s second term. The global trade war the president launched shortly after returning to office last year resulted in massive retaliatory duties on U.S. commodities from a number of major consumers, notably China. The Iran war has only made things worse: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global shipping channel, in March led to a massive spike in oil and fertilizer costs.
When I spoke to him on an exceedingly windy day in late March, Neibling described the current economic situation for farmers as “tough” more than a dozen times. That situation is often compounded by the president’s chaotic social media announcements, which can move billions more or less instantaneously. “It seems like we’ve got a market around tweets sometimes,” said Neibling, who is the president of the Kansas Soybean Association.
Some farmers say the situation is more severe than the 2018 trade war with China in Trump’s first term, when Kansas farmers alone lost nearly $1 billion in sales of soybean and sorghum, another major crop in the state.
In the first eight months of 2025, soybean exports to China had fallen to around a quarter of what they were the previous year, and from the end of May through November 2025, the United States exported no soybeans whatsoever to China. Brazil, the largest producer of soybeans in the world, now provides the vast majority of China’s soybeans.
“We’ve seen soybeans become much more of a geopolitical pawn than a trading discussion, than a market discussion,” said Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor of law and policy at the department of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Soybeans aren’t simply a commodity in Trump’s second term—they are a crucial front in a global trade war and a key part of a grinding fight with China that will shape the future of geopolitics. Family farms like Neibling’s, moreover, offer a window into the costs and consequences of the president’s economic and foreign policy for regular Americans. Prices are rising for everyone, but farmers have been hit particularly hard. For them, the global is now local. The decisions made by the Trump administration may be temporary, but their consequences will be lasting. They are already devastating.
Despite their unhappiness with Trump’s trade policies, many farmers haven’t lost their trust in him. This is in line with attitudes toward farming itself, which is an exercise in optimism amid myriad adverse conditions. Similarly, there’s a prevailing hope that the White House and Congress will address farmers’ needs in the long term—even if all evidence points to the contrary.
Farmers have always struggled with the impact of political turmoil. Older farmers speak about the economic stresses they felt nearly half a century ago, during the Carter and Reagan administrations. The 1980s were defined by a full-blown agriculture crisis that resulted in a dramatic loss in farmland value, mass foreclosures, corporate consolidation, and rural flight.
Supporting American farmers through federal subsidies has been a priority for the federal government since the Great Depression. Cognizant of farmers’ importance to the economy and as a voting bloc, even the Trump White House has attempted to insulate farmers from the full impact of its trade war. Last December, the administration announced the distribution of $12 billion in onetime payments to farmers. Around the same time, roughly $11 billion was dedicated to the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, which particularly targeted corn and soybean farmers. Kansas received $888 million in payments through this program, the third-highest amount of any state; as of April, the state had received $773 million in payments.
The farmers with whom I spoke in late March described the aid in existential terms. “Right now, my financial projections for the year are to break even, and that included the aid payment. Without the aid payment, I basically would have been looking at a loss of that same amount,” said Ryan Johnson, referring to the amount of the per-acre payment rate offered by the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program. Johnson is a corn and soybean farmer in Berryton, roughly a 15-minute drive south of Topeka.
Soybean farmers have received massive subsidies in recent years. Coppess, for instance, noted that the massive payments farmers received in the wake of the 2018 trade war were followed by significant Covid-era assistance. In 2020 and 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided roughly $31 billion to offset losses for nearly one million producers across the country. In recent years, farmers have been able to rely upon the expectation that they will receive generous government assistance.
But simply distributing payments during times of hardship—in amounts that may not even fully cover the depth of losses—will in the long-term “create a situation that allows us to kind of not make tough decisions or have difficult conversations,” said Coppess. The farmers I spoke to recognized that, in the long term, economic aid is unsustainable. “I kind of view it as filling your gas tank. You can take that money, it fills your gas tank, but immediately you start [pumping] from that gas tank. And then, unless you have the markets in place to keep it full, it runs out,” said Scott Gigstad, the chair of the Kansas Soybean Association.
Many of them believe that Congress has shirked its duty by not passing the Farm Bill, the massive omnibus legislative package that governs agricultural, nutrition, and conservation policy and delivers subsidies to farmers and food assistance to those in need. (Roughly 80 percent of the Farm Bill is devoted to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps.) The most recent Farm Bill expired in 2023, and Congress has simply extended its provisions in subsequent years without updating or expanding it.
The result, Coppess said, is a situation in which the federal government was essentially treating farmers as “pass-through entities”: The aid it delivers is immediately transferred to landlords, multinational fertilizer and chemical companies, and seed companies.
“We’re going into this planting season,” Coppess said, but nothing has been done to fix the larger problems farmers are facing. “We haven’t tried anything—[just] talk about more payments and complain about the fact that costs stay high,” he said.
Making a onetime payment to farmers can help keep them afloat, but it won’t solve the larger economic and geopolitical issues created by tariffs and international conflict. Other countries’ loss of faith in the United States as a trading partner won’t be addressed by offering money to producers when they can’t sell their goods internationally. Coppess compared the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program to a painkiller, treating a symptom, not an underlying cause.
“Going forward, making payments will make it all worse,” he said. “You sort of use payments when you expect to get back to normal. There may not be a back to normal in this situation, in which case payments are really problematic.”
Still, frustration with Trump’s trade policies does not necessarily translate to disapproval of the president himself. Initially skeptical of Trump, Johnson voted for a third-party candidate in 2016. But he found the president’s first term to be “effective” and supported him in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Today, he said he was “generally” pleased with Trump’s second-term performance, adding that he was “shocked by how much [Trump] accomplished” last year.
Joe Newland, who is the president and chair of the Kansas Farmers Bureau, is less enthusiastic but still supportive: He’s “probably not [supportive of] 100 percent [of Trump’s actions], by any means—maybe not 75 percent.” But he believes that administration officials working on trade are “some of the best minds that we’ve had in probably many years.” There has been some recent good news. Last fall, China also pledged to buy at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the final two months of 2025, and at least 25 million metric tons in each of the three subsequent years—although these levels are lower than what China has imported in years past.
“Do we have his ear all the time? No. I mean, nobody does, let’s face it,” Newland said, referring to Trump. “But if you have the Cabinet’s level ear, that’s huge.”
The president has reneged on some signature campaign promises, such as not entering any new international conflicts, and ensuring lowered gas prices. But Nick Levendofsky, the executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, observed that Trump was honest about his intention to implement higher tariffs throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, and that farmers knew what was coming down the pike.
“Trump has always said that he’s going to do tariffs, you know, and we’re going to get into a trade war. If there’s anything he didn’t lie about, that’s it,” said Levendofsky.
The journey from harvested soybean crop to oversize jug of vegetable oil in the pantry is long and meandering, involving careful timing and precision planning. It also includes regular field trips to local grain elevators, which store and occasionally process the grains and negotiate large bulk sales, essentially acting as a middleman between producers and buyers. Thousands of pounds of soybeans will cascade from the bottom of an 18-wheeler truck into a pit with an overwhelming clatter reminiscent of being trapped in a gigantic rainmaker, from whence they will be aptly elevated into huge multistory silos.
Selling commodities is somewhat akin to a futures contract on the stock market—that is, farmers agree to a price with a grain elevator before transporting the product. Farmers already have a “limited window to manage risk” when writing contracts, said Johnson, who worked as a financial adviser before entering agriculture.
“Politics can go back and forth, and if prices are a manifestation of politics, then you have to take advantage of the opportunities when they’re given to you, because sometimes those opportunities don’t last very long,” said Johnson. This is true of fuel and fertilizer purchases, as well. Tom Giessel, who farms around 950 acres of wheat, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa in Larned, western Kansas, recalled a recent conversation with a local seller about purchasing urea, a nitrogen compound used as fertilizer. The dealer gave a price for the urea, around $860 a ton. When Giessel asked how long that price would be stable, the dealer responded: “Thirty minutes.”
The tariffs and the long-term consequences of the war in Iran are not the only Trump administration actions affecting farmers. Farming has been plagued with labor shortages, particularly for manual work, in recent years, positions that are frequently filled by migrants. The Trump administration’s crackdown on legal and illegal immigration—as well as difficulty reforming the H-2A visa program, which supports bringing agricultural workers to the United States—has exacerbated those shortages.
Even Trump’s cuts in foreign aid have affected farmers. Tom Giessel, who farms wheat, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa in western Kansas, called the functional closure of USAID, an agency that helped provide food assistance across the world, a “gut punch.” USAID was a major purchaser of grain sorghum grown in the state through the Food for Peace program.
Kansas produces more than half of the world’s sorghum. Without a buyer, millions of pounds of milo were left on the ground in 2025, with no place to store them.
“There are literally mountains of grain sorghum out here piled on the ground,” said Giessel.
The upshot of this uncertainty for younger Kansas farmers is a persistent sense of dread. “The pressure on them is so great. ‘Am I going to be the generation that loses the farm?’” explained Newland. “Dealing with the weather, dealing with commodity [prices], dealing with the government, with the bank—there’s so many different things that’s weighing on them.”
Indeed, over the years, farming has increasingly become an old-timers’ game. The median age of farmers is 58, and in 2025, 40 percent of U.S. farmland was owned by farmers aged 65 and older.
Around 15,000 farms nationwide closed in 2025, including 700 in Kansas, which also saw a 10 percent increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings, designed for family farmers and fishermen. Such challenges can weigh heavily on young farmers. Newland knows of half a dozen suicides within a 30- to 40-mile radius, most recently a 22-year-old who lived nearby.
The economic instability of the current moment could also lead to greater corporate consolidation of farms—as more producers retire, their buyers may be larger companies rather than family members or new entrants into the industry. Even as the number of farms has decreased in recent years, the size of the remaining farms has increased, indicating consolidation of land into larger operations.
Meanwhile, many of the old-timers are thinking of throwing in the towel. “A lot of these guys are wanting to get out of this, because they’ve been through a lot of hard times over their lifetime, and now it’s like, ‘OK, I’m done with this,’” said Levendofsky.
But many, like Neibling, are determined not to give up, no matter how bad things are. “I don’t want to say it’s in your blood, but it’s in your blood. You know, it’s just like there’s that draw to the ground that you’ve been connected to,” he said. “There’s so much pressure on us anyway; there’s so many things that we can’t control that we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis.”
He added: “It’s tough right now.”
