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The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago
Steve Pitstick has been farming in the US Midwest for 51 years, about an hour outside Chicago, the city that grain built. Seven generations of his family have made their living off the land.
Now farms like his in Illinois — the largest soyabean-exporting state in the US — are at the rough end of President Donald Trump’s US-China trade war. Illinois paid a huge price for Trump’s last trade war with China in 2018. Back then, the US lost $27bn in agricultural exports in 2018-19 alone, with losses concentrated in the Midwest. Illinois alone lost $1.41bn annualised.
I caught up with Pitstick as he was rushing to get this year’s soyabean and corn crops into the ground on his son’s farm near Elburn, Illinois. Talking fast so that he could get back to moving boxes of seed around the farm with a forklift, the 66-year-old tells me he’s not fretting about the recent dramatic deterioration in trade relations with China, the top export destination for US soyabeans. And neither is the market, he says. “So far the [soyabean futures] market has proven that it doesn’t care . . . it has actually rallied since the tariffs started,” he tells me. “It will all work out in the end.”
Farmers are often sanguine but this is more than mere optimism. “I firmly believe we’re on the right track [with tariffs],” Pitstick tells me, gesturing to nearby railway tracks that he says carry “container after container of junk” that US consumers buy, mostly from China. “We need to send something out of this country to balance out that trade, right?” That, he says, is what Trump is trying to do.
But doesn’t he blame the last trade war for dramatically boosting Brazil’s soy exports to China — at the expense of farms like his? Pitstick points out, rightly, that the rise of Brazil as an agricultural exporter started well before Trump was elected; he thinks it will continue with or without tariffs. “We’re in uncharted territory — but then we are always in uncharted territory,” he says, recalling that American agriculture has survived worse, pointing to President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 US grain embargo against the Soviet Union.
Many Illinois farmers I interviewed last week — not to mention the futures market — seem to think there will be a trade deal with China before the crop they are planting now is harvested. But some are less sanguine than Pitstick. “The last time tariffs hit, every third row of soyabeans [in the US] was going to China, and today it’s only one out of every four,” Bill Wykes, former chair of the Illinois Soybean Association, tells me. “It’s kind of scary.”
Ron Kindred, the current chair, echoes his concerns: “We understand what the president is trying to accomplish but is this the best way to do it? He is trying to level the playing field for us and that would be a good thing but we can’t endure a whole lot of pain right now because the price of our commodities has gone down substantially in the past two years.
“We have $10 soyabeans right now . . . but will we have $7 soyabeans next year? That’s not something we can live with,” he tells me. Agricultural economists expect Illinois corn and soyabean farmers to lose money this year.
True, the Trump administration has promised help for US farmers caught in the trade war, after spending heavily to bail them out last time. But Kindred says most farmers — who vote heavily Republican — aren’t comfortable with government handouts and prefer to work for what they earn. Even worse, the trade war is destroying the US reputation as a reliable trading partner, he tells me.
Current China tariffs make US soyabeans uncompetitive: the US Soybean Association estimates duties, tariffs and value-added taxes in China now total nearly 150 per cent, “so if you send a bushel of beans to China that cost $10 here, it’s going to cost $25 there plus shipping costs”.
If that persists, will it hurt Trump’s substantial support among farmers? Pitstick says he isn’t turning against the president anytime soon. And a recent CBS News poll showed 91 per cent of Republicans remain convinced he has a clear plan on trade.
“If China doesn’t buy our stuff, somebody else will,” Illinois farmer John Andermann tells me. For now, the state’s farmers remain focused on getting seeds in the ground. In Trump’s America, anything could happen before harvest time.
