It was time for Beau Hanson to put down his bets.
Just like other farmers in the west of Iowa, Mr. Hanson at the beginning of April for planting spring. The decisions he made could then determine whether he would be in red or black coming autumn harvest.
In agriculture there are always uncertainties, and around Monona County, where Mr. Hanson lives, they weigh them. It has been a few difficult years. A wet spring in 2024 meant that some farmers had to replant three times. This year it is too dry. The price of soybeans has fallen, while the costs of seed and fertilizer have remained high, as well as the interest rates on the loans that farmers take to buy those things. The rates have reached 9 percent, more than double what they were three years ago.
And now there is an extra variable: a trade war.
The rate of 145 percent that President Trump imposed on Chinese input in April was imposed on the American goods that China will enter with a retaliation installation of 125 percent. In practice, that means a substantial burden on midwestern crops. China is the largest importer of American soybeans, who buys something $ 12.8 billion worth Last year. According to the American Soybean Association, the new rates, together with different taxes, bring the effective rate for the crop up to 155 percent.
Even before Mr Trump left the current rate war, some farmers in Iowa looked at the possibility of a third consecutive year of losses. Everything slows down. Lenders are becoming more careful. Sellers of machines and heavy equipment also feel the mood shift, while farmers still come out of aging tractors, planters and other large machines for a year, instead of buying new ones.
“Every year is uncertain,” said Mr. Hanson. “But this year it is especially difficult.”
Mr. Hanson grew up in Castana, Iowa, and played football in the local high school. After visiting the Iowa Central Community College, where he was an offensive lineman, Mr. Hanson, 35, returned and bought the farm next to the house in which he grew up. In contrast to many of his colleagues who left the farming life for jobs in larger cities, he tries to build his future on the fertile land established by four generations of his family.
He works 700 hectares with a combination of soy and corn, and he covers his bets with 400 head cattle. His three children, involved in 4-H, provide a few newborn British white park calves in the barn.
Like many national Iowa communities, Monona County voted heavily for Mr Trump, 72 percent, in the elections. Mr. Hanson will not discuss his voice and notes that he is in the County Fair Board and sells seed to customers in the entire area.
“I don’t want to be political,” said Mr. Hanson, kick the dirt with his brown work boots and carefully choose his words. “But a trade war will probably not help to help grain prices here.”
An ultrasound of the 1980s
During five days at the beginning of April I crossed rural communities in the west of Iowa and talked to farmers. The roads were known to me. I grew up with driving tractors and worked the fields on the small corn and soybean farm of my family in Blencoe, about 20 miles southwest of Mr. Hanson.
In my teenage years in the 1980s I poured coffee for farmers who were at long tables in Helen’s Cafe in Onawa. I listened to rain quantities, crop yields and the size of the fish they caught compared. I knew we had a good year when Dad bought a new pick -up. During a particularly bad year, my birthday gift was a clock radio, bought at the local shop of the farm, probably, so that my parents could claim it as a farm costs.
The worries that farmers are now reminiscent of my teenage years. “The 80s, the 80s, the 80s,” said Gary Jensen, who lands in the Loess Hills, a rough terrain that abruptly stops from the Iowa plains. “It always comes up.”
The 1980s were a dark time for American farmers. A tradeembargo against the Soviet Union led to the fall of grain prices, just when the Federal Reserve increased interest rates to no less than 20 percent in an attempt to keep inflation into check. The land prices fell, reducing the value of the collateral that farmers had used to get loans. By some estimates300,000 farmers were not in default of loans, which resulted in the largest number of banking failure since the great depression. The farm crisis crushed many small city.
At the age of 33, Mr. Jensen too young to have experienced that time, but he has heard enough to know that things can go south quickly and he must be careful. When we met, he prepared his Red Case tractor for the planting season. When I asked how old the tractor was, he laughed. It was manufactured in 1989, three years before he was born. He does not intend to replace it. “There is no new equipment,” he said.
Farmers are tighter their belts, said Barry Benson, a senior vice president of Agribusiness Banking at Fnbo, the first National Bank in Omaha. “They are going to walk the mowing porter for another year or run the tractor for another year,” he said.
In the months before planting spring, Mr Benson and other lenders usually meet farmers to talk about the size of operating lenses they need for the coming season. Someone with a relatively small farm, around 400 hectares, can take a loan of $ 250,000 to pay for seed, fertilizer and leasing the country and repay the loan after harvest.
But Mr Benson estimated that a third of last year’s loans could not be repaid and restructured, which meant a different loan for some farmers. Others had to sell equipment or land.
Dan Dotzler, the president and chief executive of the United Bank of Iowa in Ida Grove, said his bank had “some hard and long” conversations with farmers.
“We really try to work out things, do everything we can do, because these are long relationships,” he said. “But we also recommend that farmers are looking for ways to get extra income to supplement the livelihood. You have to go to the city and get a job to maintain yourself and your family. It is now a different environment than a few years ago.”
Mr Dotzler remains optimistic and believes that if farmers keep the costs low, they will be largely in order. But he is also concerned about high interest rates, valuable repairs of machines and the lack of a farm account in the congress. And of course rates.
“There is so much unknown about what will happen to the rates and how it will influence everything,” said Mr Dotzler. “There is just a lot of waiting for that front, which leads to fear.”
‘Export, export, export’
A way in which the farm economy from the eighties was restored was by export, in particular with an emerging market: China.
China was booming and needed soy and other feed for his own cattle industry. From a starting point of zero in the 1990s, China became a critical market for American agricultural products, as a result of which a Peak in 2022When it imported $ 36.4 billion of products, including soybeans, corn, sorghum, poultry and pork, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Export markets such as China are essential because American farmers produce much more than American customers can buy. The industrialized farms that cover the Midwestern landscape use modern planters that drive themselves practically with the help of GPS technology and seeds at the perfect depth and width, all in a small fraction of the time that farmers need that older equipment. Moreover, the seed itself not only generates more crop per hectare, but it is better in protecting the young plants against vermin and diseases.
The result is increasing yields. Corn, used in the production of animal feed and ethanol, has a larger domestic market, with exports that are approximately good 15 percent of the harvest.
However, soybeans are much more sensitive to trade wars. About 40 percent of the soybean crop is exported.
“Export, export, export – that is where the market is,” said Milo Ruffcorn, 66, a farmer from Mondamin, Iowa. “We need someone to sell our corn and soybeans.”
Worried that a long -term trade war between the United States and an important buyer of agriculture such as China could suppress soybeans, Mr. Hanson and many other farmers are gambling large on corn this year.
The prices for both crops have fallen by around 40 percent since May 2022. For farmers, where prices are viewed against gloomy, possible money loss levels, math is simple: go for yield. That means maize, which produces more per hectare.
Mr. Hanson decided to plant corn on 90 percent of his hectare. This year, farmers are expected to plant 95 million hectares of corn, the highest amount in five years, according to the USDA
On paper, Mr. Hanson calculates that after paying rent on his 700 hectare, buying crop insurance, seed and various chemicals and repaying his business loan, he can make a profit of $ 60,000, or about $ 85 per ACRE, on corn. His calculations are loss with soybeans.
“It makes no sense to go into the field and plant a crop, expect a loss,” said Mr. Hanson, shaking his head.
The Trump -Veily Net
Karol King put in a sandwich with pork tenderloin with a side of Macaroni salad in Frannie’s Cafe in Main Street in the center of Onawa. My father worked for Mr. King in the nineties and 2000s and set up irrigation systems.
A lifelong Republican who voted on Mr Trump, Mr. King, 78, gives the president high marks for his heavy attitude towards rates, especially at China, even if the only pain caused for farmers like himself.
“It will be difficult, but they are weaker than we think,” he said, “and we are their biggest customer.”
But even if there is an impasse with China about trade and grain prices, Mr. King and other farmers continue to believe that Mr. Trump will save them.
“For some reason, he likes farmers and workers,” said Mr. King. “We will not be hung to dry.”
Mr. Trump has not discouraged that faith. In mid -April on his social media platform, Truth Social, he placed that American farmers stood in the “frontlin” of a trade war with China, and added: “The US will protect our farmers !!!”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he imposed rates at China who were confronted with Chinese retaliation rights on soybeans, corn, wheat and other American products. The US government has given an emergency reception package of approximately $ 23 billion To farmers to relieve the pain.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And the congress continued some of the subsidies, including a payout of $ 10 billion last year to make up for the low raw material prices. Mr. Hanson said that the money he had received from the government even helped him to break on some land and to squeeze a small profit on other fields.
All farmers with whom I talked in Iowa said they want to sell their corn, soybeans and other raw materials at a good price in the market. And almost all of them said they would take the taxpayer money if it was offered.
“I’d rather have corn above $ 5 per bushel and $ 11 beans,” said Mr. Hanson. “Without that we need a safety net to protect family farms such as mine.”
Yet Mr. Hanson not on one hand out.
“Are we going to get a government payment to help us this year?” Mr. Hanson shrugged. Another uncertainty.
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