Farmers are probably the best equipped of us all to weather storms. Doug Sombke, a fourth-generation farmer and rancher from Groton, South Dakota, thinks Hurricane Donald might be the most devastating one he’s seen yet. Within weeks of taking office, Trump mounted a topsy-turvy global trade war, which has, so far, mostly served to devastate the working-class Americans he swore to enrich. Worst of all, it’s made an enemy of Canadians, America’s favourite agricultural business partners—and, as Sombke calls us, its “country cousins.”

For the 18,000 members of the South Dakota Farmers Union, of which Sombke is president, the ripple effects of the tariffs have been bleak: skyrocketing prices for fertilizer and machinery (made of Canadian potash and steel, respectively), sad soybean sales and a ton of hate mail sent from north of the border. Sombke recently spoke with Maclean’s about surviving America’s trade-war season, gracefully taking licks from his farmer friends up north and why messing with South Dakota’s flow of Canadian imports might be enough to sour even the reddest of his state’s Republicans on Trump for good.

Your family has farmed in South Dakota for four generations. What would you say is your specialty?

Depending on the rotation, corn and soybeans swap between first and second place as the state’s main exports every year. My family is more concentrated on livestock than cultivating our land, so I’d say our specialty is cattle—Black Angus, which are much more friendly than other breeds when they’re calving. We also have a hunting lodge on the farm and two of my sons train hunting dogs. My other son has a soil-sampling business. And one of my daughters-in-law is a vet, so we use her for all the animals. We’ve covered all the bases to help ourselves.

We produce a lot of our own corn and beef up here, which are big South Dakotan exports. Prior to the trade war, what were Canadians buying from you?

It’s honestly more about what we were buying from you: a lot of Canadian piglets to put in our finishing plants. Seed and........

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