WAHOO, NE (AP) — Strong winds began to blow as fifth-generation farmer Doug Bartek was heading to the grain bin to shovel soybeans into the conveyor chute. The 60-year-old man was anxious at the start of the spring planting season, listing a long list of problems affecting his family’s livelihood on the 2,000-acre farm near Wahoo, Nebraska.
Low soybean prices resulting from the high cost of fuel, equipment, and fertilizer (also driven by the Iran war), as well as tariffs and global oversupply that are perceived by suppliers as “price gouging.” The burden of all this falls on Bartek, who is president of the Nebraska Soybean Association.
Bartek said, “Our biggest struggle is our inputs, be it fertilizer, seeds, chemicals or parts.” “There’s been a huge increase in all of these. And I feel like the farmer is backed into a corner.”
Bartek’s concerns are shared by many soybean producers in the Midwest. While costs such as equipment have increased over time, soybean prices have remained low. They say the Trump administration’s tariffs last year and the resulting months-long trade war with China have made things worse. Later, the Iranian war curtailed and imposed restrictions on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. global fertilizer materials and I send Fertilizer prices skyrocketed. The ceasefire agreement announced on April 7 raised hopes that the bottlenecks in the Bosphorus would be eliminated, but the future of the agreement was uncertain.
“A lot of producers are pretty nervous going into this year,” said Justin Sherlock, soybean farmer and president of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association. “It looks like we’re going to have another year of negative returns.”
Soybeans, used as animal feed, food and biofuel, are among the United States’ largest agricultural exports. This hasn’t always been the case. Before the 1960s, soybeans were not a major crop in the United States, according to Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. Until the 1990s, soybean production did not accelerate due to international demand, primarily from China, and soybeans and corn were now dominant in US agriculture.
But U.S. soybean farmers, who often also grow corn, had been facing financial problems for years, even before the start of the Iran war. Soybean prices have been consistently low in recent years. The global market is abuzz with soybeans, driven in part by Brazil overtaking the United States. world’s largest soybean producer Years ago.
“If we look at global soybean production over the past few years, it continues to break record after record,” Hart said. “There is huge supply around the world and this has led to prices falling.”
Meanwhile, costs for Midwestern soybean farmers have increased. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, overall farm production expenses, including seeds and pesticides, have increased over time. According to the agency, operating costs of soybean production have remained high since 2020 and are expected to increase again in 2026.
Experts say the cost of land is also a major problem for farmers. Crop land values in the midwest have increased. Most farmers in the region rent some of their land, according to Joana Colussi, a research assistant professor in the agricultural economics department at Purdue University.
Bartek, who rents three-quarters of his land, said that landowners increased rents and this increased financial distress.
“There are a lot of what I call absentee landowners who have no idea what’s going on on the farm,” he said. “All they know is that their taxes have gone up and somehow you can make up the difference.”
“They’re very concerned about negative margins from low prices and high cost,” said Paul Mitchell, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There is a liquidity crunch for many of them and they are trying to figure out how to deal with everything.”
The number of farms in the U.S. has decreased over time and consolidation among farmers is a long-term trend, but farmers’ financial pressures caused by high input costs and low commodity prices are also contributing, Hart said. Large farms tend to be more competitive and dependent on large, expensive machinery.
“The financial reserves a farm needs are much greater than they used to be,” Hart said. “We are a little more sensitive to financial conditions these days because there is so much capital involved in the farming business.”
Market forces are not the only problems weighing on farmers. Sweeping tariffs The tax, which President Donald Trump implemented in April 2025, worsened the trade war with China. The United States is the largest buyer of soybeans. China responded with retaliatory tariffs and effectively boycotted U.S. soybeans. Cutting off a major export market For Midwestern farmers, this drives the price of soybeans even lower.
“When this was announced and soybean prices basically crashed, if you could hold on to your beans and wait for better times, it was fine,” said Mike Cerny, a soybean and winter wheat corn farmer in Sharon, Wisconsin. “If you had a mortgage or overdue payments or cash flow needs and had to sell at that point, you were doing it pretty hard.”
Finally USA and China Agreement reached in late 2025. Beijing has committed to purchasing 12 million metric tons of soybeans by January and at least 25 million metric tons annually for the next three years. China has since Reached first soybean purchasing goal and the Trump administration also launched an application $12 billion temporary aid package in December to support farmers affected by the trade war.
But experts and farmers say the damage has already been done. While renewed Chinese purchases and federal payments have helped, they are not enough to offset farmers’ losses. Even after federal aid, farmers still lose almost $75 per acre of soybeans harvested in the 2025 crop, according to the American Soybean Association. And the trade war has pushed China towards rival soybean exporters. like brazil — Accelerating the downward trend in U.S. soybean exports to China.
“When China decided to stop buying, we couldn’t find enough other markets to replace those sales,” Hart said. “We’re still feeling the effects today. When you look at where soybean exports are today and where we would normally expect them to be, we’re still 15% to 20% behind normal.”
Joseph Glauber, the former chief economist for the Department of Agriculture between 2008 and 2014, said U.S. soybean farmers are benefiting from their global rivals’ trade war.
“When China imposes tariffs against the United States, it tends to buy from Brazil or Argentina, mostly Brazil,” Glauber added. “We do not dominate the world as much as we used to in terms of the global export market for soybeans.”
After the USA and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, there was a serious slowdown in shipping traffic through Iran. Strait of Hormuz caused oil prices to rise. The shipping disruption has also largely halted exports of nitrogenous fertilizers produced in the Persian Gulf and limited access to key fertilizer ingredients. The price of urea, the most traded nitrogenous fertilizer, has increased rapidly.
Soybeans do not require nitrogen fertilizer, but it is vital for corn, and most soybean farmers also grow corn. About half of the global urea supply comes from the Middle East, and Qatar and Saudi Arabia are two of the top sources of U.S. fertilizer imports, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
USA and Iran Agreed on a two-week ceasefire This included the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz last week, but disputes over Israeli attacks on Lebanon have slowed traffic and the price of urea remains high.
Many Midwestern farmers purchased their fertilizer well before the spring planting season. However, some farmers who do not purchase early face high prices. Dave Walton, a corn, soybean and hay farmer in Iowa and vice president of the American Soybean Association, said in March that some of his neighbors didn’t have cash on hand to buy fertilizer last fall and were having a hard time budgeting for fertilizer because of high prices.
The war also caused this Gasoline and diesel prices will increasecausing more headaches for farmers. Oil prices fell But the war and the closure of the strait will have lasting effects on farmers, said Seth Goldstein, senior equity analyst at investment research firm Morningstar, after the ceasefire announcement. Facilities critical to the export of chemicals, oil and other commodities in the Middle East were damaged or destroyed during the war, and supply chains will take time to recover, he said.
“Facilities such as liquid natural gas power plants have been affected,” Goldstein added. “You’re also facing a huge supply shortage of commodity chemicals, which are inputs into crop chemicals.”
“We burn a lot of diesel fuel,” said Chris Gould, a corn and soybean farmer in Maple Park, Illinois. “It’s hard to say whether I’ll be ahead or behind in this whole deal. But I suspect I’ll be behind.”
Farmers’ financial problems are reflected in some measures. While farm bankruptcies are still relatively low, they continued to rise in 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. In a survey of 400 farmers conducted in late March by researchers at the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, nearly half said their farm operations were in worse financial shape than a year ago.
Morningstar analyst Goldstein said high costs and lower incomes for farmers contributed to the increase in bankruptcies between 2024 and 2025. If costs rise faster than crop prices going forward, he added, it would “put farmers in a difficult position again and possibly lead to more bankruptcies.”
After 43 years of farming, Bartek said the smell of fresh soil still gets him excited for spring planting. But he also knows about farmer suicides, bankruptcies, and “retirement sales,” where farmers are forced to auction off their operations because of financial problems. Bartek likens farmers to gamblers who “put millions of dollars into the ground” in the hope of winning.
Bartek occasionally doubts his decision to start farming. He also worries about his son, who bought a farm a few years ago.
Bartek wonders: “Did I do the right thing by helping him start farming?”
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Kelety reported from Phoenix.
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This story is a collaboration between Lee Enterprises and The Associated Press.
