The Foreign Policy of the American Farm

What happens when decisions made for diplomacy decide whether crops sell, ranchers survive, or rural towns disappear.

Scott Brown stood in front of his cattle farm in Arkansas, land his family had worked since the Oklahoma land rush in the early 1800s. He had a month or two left before he would lose everything.

“I’m the one that’s going to lose all this,” Brown said. There was no way to turn a profit anymore.

For decades, farmers in Arkansas sold large amounts of their soybean harvest to China. Bad weather, inflation, and tariffs led China to start buying from Brazil and Argentina instead. The Agricultural Council of Arkansas warns that current challenges could close one in three farms in the state. Beijing feels distant. But it isn’t.

When Presidents Trump and Xi met in October, the centerpiece of their agenda wasn’t semiconductors or Taiwan. It was soybeans. The meeting aimed to ease tensions in their monthslong trade war, at least temporarily. China committed to buying 12 million tons of US soybeans by year’s end, then 25 million annually for three years. For Brown and thousands like him, that agreement was the difference between survival and bankruptcy. But the announcement didn’t mean that soybean farmers would now flourish.

Dennis Carlson, who has been farming in North Dakota since he was 16, scrambled to find a buyer after his local grain elevator — the facility that buys, stores, and ships crops to market — stopped taking soybeans. China, which normally purchases 70% of the state’s crop, had vanished from the market.

Carlson trucked his beans to a different elevator much farther away for a much lower price. He considered himself lucky — he’d been hearing constantly about other farmers stuck with no buyer at all.

Carlson’s story repeated across the Midwest. American agriculture exports roughly 20% of what it produces, according to the Department of Agriculture. That holds farmers hostage to trade relationships that can fracture overnight. China alone bought more than $12 billion worth of American soybeans in 2024 — half the value of the entire US crop. When Trump’s trade war emptied that market, the impact was immediate. Elevators stopped buying. Prices collapsed. Farmers with no storage watched rain destroy beans piled on bare ground.

This is what foreign policy looks like on the farm: a matter not of diplomacy, but of whether your harvest even has a buyer.

It wasn’t just soybeans. China retaliated systematically. It let export licenses for hundreds of US beef facilities expire. Monthly beef exports to China are down 90% since March. China hiked tariffs on US almonds to 45 percent, hitting California growers who produce nearly 80 percent of the global supply. Total US agricultural exports to China have dropped $7 billion since January —- a 73% collapse, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And the tariff war didn’t just close markets. It also raised the cost of equipment and materials purchased overseas. Pesticides jumped nearly 20%. Tractors and machinery added 13–16%, according to a study from North Dakota State University.

Then came Argentina.

The bailout that stung

In September President Trump authorized $20 billion for Argentina, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seeking an additional $20 billion through private banks and sovereign wealth funds, potentially bringing the total to $40 billion. The country was facing an economic crisis, caused by years of fiscal deficits and a government that printed money to cover debts, driving high inflation and devaluing its currency. President Javier Milei, a close Trump ally, needed a lifeline before upcoming midterm elections.

Argentina is the world’s third-largest soybean producer. When American farmers lost their Chinese buyers, Argentina filled the gap. In October, Argentine farmers sold 2.5 million metric tons of soybeans to China. American farmers sold essentially zero.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins texted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent the bitter economics: “We bailed out Argentina yesterday and in return the Argentine’s [sic] removed their export tariffs on grains, reducing their price to China at a time when we would normally be selling to China.”

“Here we are losing our farms, and the president is helping out a foreign country,” said John Boyd, founder of the National Black Farmers Association.

Then Trump announced plans to quadruple Argentine beef imports. The move would bring down prices for American consumers. It would also gut American ranchers already reeling from years of drought.

The president campaigned on an ”America First” foreign policy. But for farmers watching their livelihoods disappear while billions flow to a foreign competitor, the slogan rings hollow.

“If Trump goes through with what he outlined, I do believe it’s a betrayal of the American rancher,” said Christian Lovell, an Illinois cattle farmer. “It’s a feeling that you’re selling us out to a foreign competitor.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which had backed Trump’s tariffs, broke publicly with the president, saying in a statement that its members “cannot stand behind President Trump while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentine beef.”

The squeeze

Vernon Flinn farms outside Des Moines, IA. He believes in self-reliance but sees a contradiction in foreign policy that is hurting America’s farmers.

“I think part of the problem we’re facing is brought on by the government. So I think the government’s got an obligation to help,” he said.

Farm bankruptcies rose 56% in the first half of 2025, to the highest level since 2021, according to US court records. Since 2017, the country has lost more than 100,000 family farms, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Trump has promised a farm bailout — as much as $12 billion, paid for by tariff revenue. Franklin Carmack, a fifth-generation Tennessee farmer, called the proposal “a Band-Aid when we need stitches.” He said “it will help pay some bills, but that’s not fixing the problem.”

Carmack and his longtime friend Jeffrey Daniels would rather work their fields than rely on American taxpayers. They have taken outside work to keep their farms afloat. And this year, instead of showing off crops at the West Tennessee State Fair, they sold T-shirts made from cotton they grew — 250 shirts at $35 each. It barely made a dent. Together, they expect to lose nearly $800,000 in 2025.

A permanent shift

The immediate damage is measurable. The long-term damage will be worse.

“Our exports in Minnesota in the last year are down 19% over a year ago, and that’s primarily due to the president’s use of tariffs,” said Gary Wertish, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union. “We’re losing our trust as a reliable trading partner around the world.”

When China stopped buying American soybeans, it bought 7.2 million tons from Brazil in September alone. Chinese state-owned companies took stakes in Brazilian ports. Brazil and China are building a railway connecting Brazil to Peru’s Chancay port, cutting shipping times to Asia.

These aren’t temporary workarounds. They’re infrastructure investments that lock in new supply chains.

US pork producers learned this during Trump’s first-term trade war. During that conflict, American pork exports to China dropped sharply as Beijing imposed retaliatory tariffs, and even after an initial trade agreement US market share never recovered. Once buyers find new suppliers, winning them back is nearly impossible.

From China’s perspective, American farms are now unreliable — the US has launched two separate trade wars in less than a decade, making American agricultural products a risky bet when alternatives exist. That’s fatal for commodity producers who compete on consistency, not uniqueness.

Meanwhile, competitors moved. In September 2025, the EU struck a trade deal with Mercosur — the political and economic bloc comprising Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Then the EU updated its agreement with Mexico. Both deals promise more South American agricultural exports into European markets that American farmers once served.

Beyond trade

Trade isn’t the only foreign policy that reaches farms. Immigration enforcement creates labor shortages. Between 2020 and 2022, 68% of hired farm workers were immigrants, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Only 32% were US-born.

Shah Kazemi runs Monterey Mushrooms across five states. The day after an ICE raid near one of his facilities, most workers didn’t show up. Even those with green cards stayed home, afraid after hearing reports of legal residents’ being deported. “If we don’t have enough workers, we cannot harvest our crops,” Kazemi said. “And if you don’t harvest, then it’s all wasted.”

Then there is the administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which eliminated a billion dollars in grain purchases — food donated abroad that American farmers had been paid to grow. “To kill that program is a disaster,” said John Bartman, who farms in Illinois. “It’s morally bankrupt, and it hurts farmers’ bottom line.”

These policy choices, which have nothing to do with agriculture, reshape what farming looks like.

The bottom line

Scott Brown isn’t waiting for Washington. He and hundreds of other Arkansas farmers have asked their elected representatives for help and requested that the Trump administration use some tariff collections to support farmers. While there is money for farmers in the Republican tax and spending law, they won’t see it until next year — too late for many operations on the edge.

Brown’s farm has survived since the early 1800s. The land he wanted his daughter to inherit might have to be sold to someone else.

Nearly 80% of voters in farming counties voted for Trump in the last election, according to Investigate Midwest. Not all have lost faith. Brent Foreman, who grows over 1,000 acres of soybeans and 650 acres of corn in Tennessee while raising 200 head of cattle, can afford to wait for Trump’s trade deal to materialize. “I have a lot of faith in him, and a lot of trust in him. And I think he’s trying to make us the best deal he can for the whole country, but for the American farmer, for the long term,” Foreman said.

Tim Kapucian, a former Republican member of the Iowa Senate who farms corn and soybeans in Iowa, expressed a similar idea: “We knew he was talking about tariffs when he was running, so we knew that would have a short-term impact,” Kapucian said. “Long term, we hope it’s to our benefit.”

With so much of their fate out of farmers’ hands, hope is the operative word. The lesson of 2025 isn’t about tariffs alone. It’s about interconnection. A farmer whose nearest neighbor is a mile away is still hostage to global markets, diplomatic relationships, and foreign policy decisions made by people who will never see his fields but will nonetheless decide whether American soybeans sell or rot, whether ranchers survive or fold, and whether rural communities endure or empty.

The question isn’t whether foreign policy matters to farmers. The question is whether policymakers understand that it does.