Soybean farmers left with product they cannot move
DES MOINES, Iowa — American farmers still working to get out their remaining soybeans after a weather-plagued harvest season are struggling to figure out what to do with a record crop now that their traditionally dominant export market is largely closed.
Usually by this point in the year, 100-car trains filled with North Dakota soybeans would be moving to ports on the West Coast destined for China. But China has all but stopped buying U.S. soybeans in response to President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs. Farmers are frantically trying to determine how to store a potentially 1 billion-bushel surplus until it can be sold at a decent price.
Farmers have been mostly patient with Trump and his plans to realign trade deals, but the loss of markets is hitting their bank accounts hard.
“As I’ve heard many people say, you can’t pay the bills with patriotism,” said Grant Kimberley, an Iowa farmer and the market development director for the Iowa Soybean Association. “You’ve got to have money, and right now we as an industry are a little short on that, because we’ve had a major hit in our No. 1 market, and it’s been reflected in a major drop in prices.”
North Dakota farmers who sell their crop at the current cash price of around $7.20 a bushel do so at a loss, given that the cost of production is about $8.50.
Trump has created a one-time
$12 billion program to compensate, and soybean farmers are slated to get the largest share. But even with payments from that fund, which amount to about 82 cents a bushel this year, the farmers still fall short of breaking even.
Farmers have been struggling for five years as the cost of land, fertilizer, chemicals and seed have remained high, but net income has fallen.
This year farmers produced a record U.S. harvest of 4.6 billion bushels, but the Agriculture Department reports exports to China are down 94 percent from a year ago.
U.S. soybean farm organizations have cultivated other buyers, but that doesn’t make up for the loss of the Chinese market.