The soybean rarely rises to any level of public interest in the United States. It is invisible to most consumers, used primarily as animal feed and, increasingly, as the raw material for biodiesel. <\/p>\n
But soy has long been a lynchpin of the U.S. agricultural economy and now, in the first harvest since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the crop has become a crucible for his bid to remake the U.S. economy by reversing decades of effort to achieve freer trade. As hundreds of millions of bushels move off American fields with no obvious buyer, will the U.S. President change course on policies that have damaged free trade \u2013 and, with it, an important agricultural product?<\/p>\n
Soy\u2019s rise as a profitable crop for the country\u2019s farmers came alongside decades of effort to liberate trade across the world. For many of those farmers, the best years in generations arrived with China\u2019s emergence as the largest importer of U.S.-grown beans. <\/p>\n
Now, China is no longer buying, purchasing instead from South America in the midst of its trade dispute with the White House. Farmers in the U.S., meanwhile, are staggering beneath new increases in the costs of goods they use to work the land and grow crops, some of them elevated by tariffs. <\/p>\n
It is putting to the test the viability of Mr. Trump\u2019s fondness for tariffs, said Michael Langemeier, director of the Center For Commercial Agriculture at Purdue University.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s always winners and losers with these policies. And it just seems to me that soybeans is a loser.\u201d<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Scott Gaffner, farmer and director with the U.S. Soybean Export Council, the Illinois Soybean Association, and the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council, works the land his family has farmed for nearly 130 years near Greenville, Ill.Nathan VanderKlippe\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n That balance had already grown uneven in the wake of COVID-19 and global inflation. Tariffs have made it worse, lifting the cost of aluminum and steel used to make equipment in the U.S. and adding cost to chemicals imported from China. <\/p>\n \u201cFor those of us that have supported this administration \u2013 that probably helped put them in the White House \u2013 it\u2019s very frustrating,\u201d said Scott Gaffner, who is a director with the U.S. Soybean Export Council, the Illinois Soybean Association, and the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council. <\/p>\n He spoke from the cab of a tractor, as he worked alongside a pair of combines, extracting beans through clouds of dust, on a farm worked by Gaffners for nearly 130 years. <\/p>\n \u201cWe have to have that free, fair trade. We have to have that ability to do that without these encumbrances upon us that are really manufactured, because of retaliatory tariffs and our tariffs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Soybeans are harvested and processed at a farm in in Dwight, Ill., in August. Illinois harvests more soy than any other state, and for many years China was the largest importer of U.S.-grown beans. <\/p>\n Scott Olson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Illinois harvests more soy than any other state, and the Gaffner family has been at the forefront of what has been a lucrative trans-Pacific soybean relationship for decades. Mr. Gaffner\u2019s mother travelled to China to promote trade in 1998, in the midst of a half-decade in which Beijing virtually eliminated its barriers to soybean imports, an important element of its accession to the World Trade Organization, which itself was a pivotal moment in liberalizing global trade.<\/p>\n For farmers, it marked a major shift from the 1980s when anyone considering a future on the fields faced dismal prospects, recalled Jerry Gaffner, Scott\u2019s brother.<\/p>\n China\u2019s enormous appetite for soybeans turned that on its head. In 1994, China was still a net exporter of soymeal. By 2003, it was the world\u2019s largest importer of beans, surpassing the European Union. In the decade that followed, Chinese buyers took possession of more than 60 per cent of U.S. soy exports.<\/p>\n Being a producer in that era was like being \u201cthe Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers in the turn of the century,\u201d Jerry Gaffner said.<\/p>\n Then came 2018, when China engineered a major disruption to soybean purchases during its trade confrontation with Mr. Trump during his first presidential term. Chinese buying subsequently returned, but never in the same numbers. China instead began to direct its attention south, to farmers in Brazil who transformed pastureland into fields of soy.<\/p>\n Since 2018, Brazil\u2019s soy harvest has swelled by 40 per cent. <\/p>\n