Soybeans Have Been A Top U.S. Ag Export For Decades. What Happens When The Top Buyer Stops Buying?
BY: Cassandra Stephenson, Tennessee Lookout; Gabby Nelson, Buffalo’s Fire and Mónica Cordero, Investigate Midwest
Tyler Stafslien is a fourth-generation farmer who’s worked his family’s land in central North Dakota for about 20 years. Roughly half of his 2,500 acres are typically dedicated to soybeans, a major crop in the state and in the Mississippi River Basin. But growing soybeans has become less profitable over the last decade as input costs rose and the Trump administration’s tariff negotiations in 2018 and 2025 destabilized trade and strained farmers’ incomes.
This year, wary of the precarious export market, Stafslien decreased his soybean acres by half.
“We’ve been experiencing in ag, the last couple of years, a downturn in commodity prices, a lot of that related to just a large supply across the globe of major commodities, but then you add this trade war on top of it, and it’s like the icing on the cake,” Stafslien said.
The administration announced Monday a $12 billion fund for one-time payments to row crop farmers to offset a portion of their inflation- and trade-related losses in the 2025 crop year.
Farmers were asking for the federal relief funds and are happy the administration is finally answering, said Stafslien. But he’s still facing uncertainty. The administration has yet to announce how much money per acre eligible growers will be receiving, and the funds will not be distributed until February, further stressing farmers like him with large debt and growing interest.
“Payments announced this week must be followed by additional and expedient efforts to keep farmers on the land and to improve the farm safety net, leaving annual bailouts as cautionary historical context rather than ongoing policy,” David Howard, policy development director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, wrote in a statement Tuesday.
Farmers and farming associations are looking for longer term solutions: to diversify trade partners and increase domestic uses for soybeans as export revenues become less certain. Some, like Stafslien, are shifting to other crops, like corn and wheat.
Soybeans are the largest agricultural export in the U.S. The legume covers more than 81 million acres, or 10%, of all U.S. farmland, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in September, and more than 40% of the nation’s soybeans are exported to other countries.
U.S. farmers received $24.5 billion from soybean exports in 2024, with Chinese purchases accounting for $12.6 billion, roughly twice the amount purchased by the next five largest export partners combined, according to USDA data.
But this year, China stopped purchasing U.S. soybeans during tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, instead falling back on its relationships with Brazil and other South American countries to meet its soybean needs. For U.S. soybean farmers, this growing season ends with low prices, unsold harvests, big financial losses and uncertainty going into the next season despite a tentative new deal with China.
“We learned firsthand that being heavily reliant on China for export sales is only good when things are good,” University of Tennessee Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics Andrew Muhammad said.
How did we get here?
Soybeans brought by traders and missionaries from Asia first took root in North America in small quantities in the 1700s, but the USDA did not begin tracking soybeans as a crop until the early 1920s.
Around that time, the USDA, land grant university extension agents and farm groups started to promote the soybean to farmers as a soil-fertilizing crop that yielded high-protein meal for animal feed, oil, and even meat replacements for human consumption. The Mississippi River Basin’s flat plains and intermittent rain proved to be ideal conditions for the crop.
Soybeans gained a foothold on U.S. farms in “fits and starts” over several decades, author Matthew Roth writes in his book, “Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America,” but really took off as a cash crop after World War I. Its success was later buoyed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act that allowed soy plantings while restricting other commodities as a way to stabilize crop prices during the Great Depression, policies limiting foreign oils, and the growing need for animal feed and oil during World War II, according to Roth.
The crop helped diversify farming in the south and midwest. By the 1960s, Roth writes, “the soybean had insinuated itself thoroughly into the American diet,” but indirectly, as feed for the country’s livestock, oils for salads and derivatives in processed foods.
At the same time, soybeans proved to be a desirable product for international trade partners. In 1989, U.S. soybean exports totaled around $4 billion, about a fifth of which went to Japan. The Freedom to Farm Act in 1996 allowed farmers to plant single-crop fields, and with rising export demand from China starting in the early 1990s, many farmers chose to plant soybeans, Roth wrote.
In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization and gained better access to globalized trade with the organization’s members, including the U.S., according to Muhammad and the Council on Foreign Relations. From there, growth in China’s tourism economy and middle class spurred increased demand for meat protein, Muhammad said, heightening the country’s need for animal feed in the form of U.S. soybeans.
By 2000, the crop was planted on more than 74 million U.S. acres, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.
“Over time, China has grown, and it seems to be the case that our total export sales have grown with our exports to China,” Muhammad explained. “They’ve sort of driven that rise over the last two decades.”
Brazil’s soybean industry has competed with American exports since the 1970s, but since 2017 has consistently exported more than the U.S.
When Trump first upped tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018, China retaliated, Muhammad said, and began investing more heavily in purchases and transportation infrastructure in Brazil. Their turn toward Brazil as a primary provider during trade negotiations in 2025 “represents a return on that investment (for China),” he said.
Farmers in the U.S. are reckoning with the fallout.
Farming pains and changing plans
Justin Sherlock farms 2,400 acres of corn and soybeans in eastern North Dakota. His dad started farming in the early 2000s and he took over the farm in 2012.
“The last, you know, 13 years that I’ve been going, the last decade, has been pretty tough to really try and get established,” he said.
For Sherlock, China coming to market very late in the 2025 harvest season was a blow to profits. Nearly one-quarter of the state’s agricultural exports hinge on soybeans, with China serving as the largest market for U.S. grain.
Sherlock was able to sell most of his soybean crop early to North Dakota soybean elevators, facilities that store the beans, which then found domestic processors in Nebraska and Kansas to sell to. But those domestic markets were also absorbing the supply that would typically be exported to China, so prices, around $8.65 per bushel, dropped significantly below Sherlock’s cost of production. He said he will lose “several hundred thousands of dollars” this year, on top of similar losses last year.
“We just have to find a way to hopefully make it to next year,” he said. “That’s the struggle right now for a lot of producers.”
Especially for young or beginning producers, said Sherlock, farmers will likely be having “tough financial discussions with their bankers and lenders.” Or, worst case scenario, these losses could mean losing their farms.