Sunday 28 / September / 2025
Sacramento: As the harvest season is underway in America's agricultural heartland, soyabean farmers found themselves in a "desperate situation" amid rising costs, extreme weather and tariff concerns.
"We're in a significant and desperate situation where none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit. They don't even break even," Stefan Maupin, executive director of Tennessee Soyabean Promotion Council, told the Tennessee Lookout news website.
Soyabean farmers planted around 1.75 million acres (708,200 hectares) of soyabeans in 2025. In its recent report, the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture estimated losses of nearly $110 million for Tennessee soyabeans this year.
Soyabean farmers had a difficult growing season as severe weather patterns -- flooding in the spring and drought in the summer -- reduced yields drastically.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicted an average soyabean yield of 53.5 bushels per acre this year. However, Maupin said this estimate was likely too high for Tennessee, with some local farmers predicting yields closer to 30 bushels an acre due to the bad weather.
"Compounding the crisis are rising costs for fertilizer, land and equipment, all while soyabean prices sink," said Newser, a news website.
According to the report of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, based on an average yield of 50 bushels per acre, soyabean farmers are projected to lose about $84 per acre as of Aug. 12. If a farmer has 3,000 acres, that is a roughly quarter-million dollar loss.
Even more troubling is the staggering scale of market loss. American soyabean farmers are losing China -- historically their largest customer -- due to the volatility of tariffs.
"Farmers are expressing growing frustration," Newser reported. "Many warn that...the current situation could stretch into years and wipe out a generation of family farms."
"US soyabean farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute with our largest customer," American Soyabean Association President Caleb Ragland wrote in a letter to US President Donald Trump in August.
"We depend on the Chinese market," Ragland told Nation of Change.
Farmers from North Dakota, a major agricultural state, are just weeks away from harvesting soyabeans, but Mike Appert, a local farmer, said there are no sales on the books.
"I think this year at the soyabean harvest we're going to kind of witness what can happen if you have a bunch of grain and no customer for it to get to," he told KFYR-TV.
Last year, soyabeans sold for $12 per bushel (about 441 dollars per metric tonne), but are now selling for $10 per bushel (about $367 per metric tonne), forcing farmers to store crops instead of shipping them to market.
Appert said he could not sell them at such a low price. "The tariffs situation is a little harder for us because you can't hedge that or manage that."
The USDA said on Friday that it is issuing a second economic assistance payment to eligible producers for the 2024 crop year.
"While federal officials have discussed aid programs to help farmers ... the overall sentiment is bleak," Newser reported.
Chad Johnson, a South Dakota farmer, expressed frustration with federal responses: "I know there were several questions presented to them, and for lack of a better word, they ignored them," he told Dakota News Now.
The American Farm Bureau Federation said that US courts reported 216 farm bankruptcies in 2024, up 55 percent from 2023.
Concerned about increased farm bankruptcies, Johnson told South Dakota Public Broadcasting: "We need help now. They need to start doing something. Either end the tariffs or come up with a trade agreement to get these tariffs ended so we can start building on what we've done for many, many years."
Maupin wondered if Tennessee's soybean farmers could survive this year, since "they're harvesting crops now."
Farmers pay most bills yearly, after revenue from selling their crops comes in. "Right now this year, and looking like going into next year, the crop will not cash flow," Maupin said.
"If it doesn't cash flow now and you're having trouble paying your operating loan back, how are you going to get funded for next year when there's nothing rosy in sight?" asked Mike Dobesh, a farmer of Nebraska, a state with a large agriculture sector.
Dobesh told local KSNB news channel that he hoped U.S. politicians could do more to fight for farmers.
