The Farmers Caught in the Middle of Trump’s Tariffs and the Iran War

Soybean farmers have been hit particularly hard. Most are sticking with the president anyway.

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........

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