While U.S. agriculture is experiencing a record harvest, its products cannot be sold. Lawmakers warn that decades of hard-won market access are being lost—Is it only the soybean market that the U.S. is losing?

U.S. farmers are losing markets painstakingly built over decades. Glenn Thompson, Republican Chair of the House Agriculture Committee from Pennsylvania, stated: “Farmers are enduring the most difficult economic period I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.” He emphasized the increasingly urgent need for assistance and expressed hope that an agricultural spending bill would provide partial support later this year. Although lawmakers did not specify the scale of aid, they indicated it would exceed the $23 billion provided during President Trump’s first term. According to projections by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, U.S. farm net income could decline by more than $30 billion in 2026 due to reduced government subsidies and persistently low commodity prices. Angie Craig, the top-ranking Democratic member of the Agriculture Committee, attributed the decline in farm net income to President Trump’s tariff policies and broader economic policies. The Minnesota congresswoman stated: “We have lost markets that farmers spent decades cultivating—and yet the president continues launching trade wars. The government must act now to end the chaos gripping rural America.” As previously reported, Caleb Lagrange, President of the American Soybean Association, issued another warning in an interview, stating that U.S. agriculture is facing a crisis. Lagrange noted that while the U.S. soybean harvest season has arrived, China—the traditional largest buyer—has placed no orders whatsoever, leaving soybean farmers in an “extremely dire situation.” “Good timing” defeated by “man-made disaster” Michael Langemeier, Director of the Purdue University Center for Commercial Agriculture, said: “I think farmers understand that this year will simply not be a good one—no matter what.” A record harvest coinciding with a terrible year—and growing farmer pessimism as harvest approaches—has led observers across the U.S. to widely conclude that the tariff war is responsible for this paradox. Multiple U.S. media outlets report that the tariff war has inflicted comprehensive damage on American farmers—from planting to selling grain. U.S. agricultural machinery and fertilizer rely heavily on imports; the White House’s tariff war has dramatically increased farming costs in the U.S. Moreover, U.S. agriculture depends heavily on international markets—for example, roughly half of U.S. soybean output is exported. The tariff war has disrupted global trade, significantly eroding the competitiveness of U.S. agricultural exports and triggering sharp declines in commodity prices. In other words, due to the destructive impact of the tariff war, U.S. farmers’ expenditures this year reached a record high even before harvesting their record-breaking crops—and after harvest, the prices they can fetch for their crops are lower than before. Representative Mark Alford, a Republican from Missouri, acknowledged that although farmers in his district “will have one of the largest corn crops in history,” many are barely surviving due to sky-high input costs and rock-bottom commodity prices. “We’re running out of time,” said Darin Johnson, fourth-generation farmer and President of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, sounding deeply anxious: “Even if we ultimately reach an agreement [with China], it will be too late for this year’s harvest.” Johnson warned they face “soybean oversupply”—a situation whose consequences could be “devastating.” Nick Levendofsky, head of the Kansas Farmers Union, told local media: “Farmers are on the verge of collapse—and yet this administration says, ‘Just wait a little longer.’ Farmers don’t have time to wait. Farmers need immediate action from the White House, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and Congress.

What is the current state of U.S. farm operators’ livelihoods?

The roots of critical agrarian studies lie in late-19th-century efforts to understand and predict the diverse roles small-scale producers played in national development trajectories [Kautsky, 1983 [1899]; Lenin, 1956 [1899]; Marx, 1995 [1867]]. Central to these debates was the question: Would agricultural production follow the industrial path—would the agricultural sector likewise split into classes defined by labor relations—or would the distinctive features of smallholder farming—its “dependent autonomy”—hinder class polarization (Narotzky, 2016)? A key strand within these discussions focused on identifying the logic and practices enabling intergenerational reproduction of family farms (Chayanov, 1966; van der Ploeg, 2013). After fading from prominence in the first half of the 20th century, this question reemerged in the Cold War context, reinvigorating scholarly interest in the 1970s and 1980s; international research shifted away from analyzing agrarian class evolution as a universal process, instead treating it as a dynamic process inevitably embedded within specific regional historical contexts (Brenner, 1976; Goodman et al., 1987; Mann, 1990; Byres, 1995). Agriculture’s necessary interaction with nature and its biological cycles (Mann & Dickinson, 1978), along with farmers’ capacity for “self-exploitation” of family labor (Friedmann, 1978; Reinhardt & Barlett, 1989), became pivotal theoretical explanations for why agricultural systems resist class polarization under certain conditions. This body of scholarship remains the principal theoretical foundation for critical social-scientific research on U.S. agricultural structure and its impacts on farm livelihoods. The long-term decline in the number of U.S. farms and farmers, the concomitant increase in average farm size, and the meager economic returns earned by most farms are all well-documented trends (USDA ERS, 2021a). Profit clearly exists in agriculture—but the vast majority flows to processors, input suppliers, distributors, and retailers. Even as U.S. grain commodity and livestock production volumes have recently hit historic highs, farm livelihoods remain precarious. What conditions within U.S. agriculture have driven these trends? Drawing upon and adapting theoretical contributions from agrarian political economy, recent agrarian social science research offers several explanations. First, the agricultural sector underwent dramatic structural change during the 20th century. The sector became heavily oriented toward corporate specialization, intensification, overproduction, and large-scale monoculture (Barlett, 1989; Buttel, 2006). Spatial separation between livestock and crop production created waste-management challenges for the former and soil-fertility maintenance challenges for the latter (Berry, 1977). This process also generated an economic configuration pitting livestock producers—who purchase feed as an input—against grain producers, laying the groundwork for the uneven benefits of the ethanol boom (Baines, 2015).

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