A season of uncertainty: As Trump trade threats loom, a Minnesota farm family braces for impact

Opinion editor’s note: This is the first in an occasional series of columns about the impact of federal decisions on agriculture, with a focus on one particular Minnesota farm family, the Johnsons. Installments are anticipated throughout the growing season, during the harvest and beyond.

•••

KENYON, Minn. — Spring started with a jolt for Ben and Meredith Johnson. A tornado touched down near their hog operation, toppling an outbuilding and veering uncomfortably close to the barns that can house 7,000 weaner pigs. But soon after, the weather shifted: Clear skies and dry conditions gave them a short but crucial window to plant their 2025 corn and soybean crop.

“Go time” is a family effort. Ben’s father and brother, along with Meredith’s dad, all pitch in to help get seed in the ground on the family’s 2,500 acres in southeastern Minnesota. In mid-May, Ben and his father, Steve, checked the hydraulics on their Case IH Magnum 340 tractor before loading up with enough soybean seed to cover 80 acres.

As Steve planted the first rows, Ben followed behind on an ATV, hopping off to plunge a handheld gauge into the soil to check moisture and seed depth. Everything looked right. Soon enough, Ben was in another field in a different tractor, determined to keep going until “I get tired or run out of field.”

As I sat in the cab with Ben, it was impossible not to feel the spark that comes with a new growing season. After the months he spent analyzing yield reports, calculating how to stretch every dollar and watching price projections, one could sense his rush to work the soil: “Finally,” said Ben, a soft-spoken 44-year-old father of three who’s wanted to farm since ninth grade.

But this year, there’s an anxious edge to that springtime optimism: the on-again, off-again trade war driven by President Donald Trump. Like most Midwest farmers, the Johnsons bought seed and planned crop rotations long before Trump took office. That planning left little maneuverability as Trump proposed tariffs historic in their sweep if fully implemented.

“It’s just this bouncing back and forth with no plan,” Ben said. He shared a recent conversation he had with a peer at a baseball game. “He said, ‘Well, it hasn’t been a problem.’ And I told him, ‘Well, it hasn’t hit yet.’”

The Johnsons’ farm sits a few miles outside Kenyon, a small Goodhue County town of 1,900 people about an hour south of the Twin Cities. Their kitchen table, surrounded by three busy kids and a friendly golden retriever, is a world apart from the halls of Congress and the sound bites on cable news. But it’s exactly the kind of place where tariffs’ consequences will be most visible.

National debates about trade policy often fixate on political wins and losses, or how these policies might play out in the 2026 midterms. Pundits parse the impact on GDP or the stock market. But for farm families like the Johnsons, trade policy isn’t abstract. It’s the price of soybeans. It’s whether pork sales to China keep flowing. It’s the difference between profitability and a year in the red.

Christopher Phelan, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota, put it bluntly. What’s proposed here is nothing short of renegotiating the entire “post-World War II trade structure.”

To be sure, it’s too soon to draw any firm conclusions about the Trump trade policy’s effectiveness. Tariffs with various countries have been paused and percentages escalated and de-escalated. Court rulings have complicated things. The unconventional approach might work. But there are reasonable concerns it could badly backfire.

What’s clear right now is that Midwest farmers have little buffer against these shifting trade winds. They’re not just part of the economy — they’re its backbone. They grow the crops that feed the world and power the region’s economy.

Their stories deserve a bigger share of the national conversation. To elevate their perspective, this column is the first in an occasional series that will follow the Johnsons through 2025, chronicling how trade policies — and the global uncertainties they unleash — play out on their farm.

There’s a lot at stake here, even for Minnesotans who have never set foot on a farm. Soybeans, corn, feeds and meat are the state’s leading agricultural exports. This economic sector isn’t just an idyllic backdrop; it’s a $14 billion economic engine that supports more than 52,000 jobs, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture reports. When policies destabilize that foundation, we all feel the tremors.

Yet Congress still has a chance to exercise its authority either to rein in tariffs or to ensure quick, robust assistance if necessary. They should hear from families like the Johnsons, whose livelihoods are caught in the crossfire. Political debates can’t obscure that basic reality.

The Johnsons themselves keep their politics private. They know rural Minnesota counties swung heavily for Trump in 2024, but that doesn’t matter when you’re in the field. No matter who they voted for, every farm family has to find a way to make the numbers work in this new uncertainty. The rest of us have a lot riding on how well they do.

Kyle Huneke, who teaches farmers through Minnesota’s Farm Business Management (FBM) program, has watched industry pressures mount. He slid the FBM’s 2024 report across the table to me. That annual analysis spells it out starkly: Net farm income dropped more than 50% in 2024. And it’s down nearly 90% from 2022 levels.

It’s important to note that the decline is measured against the prosperous years that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the numbers tell a troubling story of mounting costs and shrinking returns. Corn costs on owned land jumped from $686 an acre in 2020 to $897 in 2024. Yields fell from 210 bushels to 182. That means every bushel matters — and margins are becoming razor-thin.

For farmers like the Johnsons, who rent some of their land, the math is even worse. In 2024, net returns for corn on rented land fell to a loss of nearly $50 an acre. Soybeans were just as bleak: a loss of $36 an acre.

Farmers play the long game, planning carefully so good years can sustain them through bad. “You have to ride the highs and lows,“ Huneke said.

But the trade war’s uncertainties make that more difficult, exacerbating existing pressures, such as stubborn interest rates and rising costs, that farmers are grappling with right now.

But even with those advantages, a break-even worksheet the Johnsons put together through the FBM program tells a sobering story. Current corn and soybean prices currently hover above what it costs them to grow. Maybe there will be another trade truce with China — by far the biggest importer of U.S. soybeans — and other countries when the current one expires in July. Maybe. But no one knows how that uncertainty will ripple out through prices and demand.

Meredith, 41, points out that unlike many businesses, they can’t pass on extra costs. To illustrate, she relates that the couple is considering adding central air to their home. The contractor gave them a bid but said he soon intends to raise prices. “He has the control to do that,” she said. In contrast, the markets set the prices for what her family grows and sells.

The Johnsons also just can’t switch to some other crop. Seed’s already in the ground. Much of the equipment they use is built for corn and soybeans, not some new high-value alternative. Even shifting a few acres here and there doesn’t make much difference when you’re farming on tight margins.

Federal aid provided limited relief after Trump’s 2018 tariffs. But it took two years for the Johnsons to get the money. While helpful, it “took a big projected loss and made the projected loss a little less,” Ben said. ”It didn’t turn around and make an unprofitable farm profitable."

The Johnsons also worried that one-time aid can’t fix the bigger problem: Buyers like China can shift to other suppliers, such as Brazil, which overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest soybean supplier in 2013.

For now, the Johnsons are carefully weighing big purchases, such as adding central air conditioning to the house. They bought a used car early for their oldest daughter to avoid getting hit by possible price spikes from tariffs on cars and parts. They’re doing everything they can to prepare for the unknown. But they know there’s only so much a family can do on its own when global trade wars come knocking.