A boycott on soybeans by China left U.S. soybean farmers without their primary customer for the bulk of 2025, with many still struggling after China agreed to resume purchasing in October.
Soybeans were just one of dozens of farm products that saw lower prices in 2025 because of global trade wars initiated by President Trump, who slapped tariffs on nearly every country in the world this past year.
Addressing the rough year for farmers, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in December of 2025 a $12 billion farmer bailout program to be delivered in 2026, but many farmers and farm advocacy groups are left unsatisfied by the deal.
“Are we going to end up having to rely on the taxpayer to make us whole from here on out?” said Gene Stehly, a soybean, corn, and wheat farmer from South Dakota. “I don’t know of one farmer who wouldn’t prefer the free market,” he said.
Soybean farmers like Stehly were collateral damage in Trump’s trade wars, according to Ryan Mulholland, senior fellow in international economic policy at the Center for American Progress.
“China simply stopped buying soybeans as a form of protest [against the tariffs] and as a form of building leverage, knowing how much that would hurt the U.S. agricultural sector,” he said.
“And it did.”
The U.S. exported nearly 27 million tons of soybeans to China in 2024, and almost none in 2025. The October agreement between the U.S. and China guaranteed 12 million tons of soybeans would be exported to China through January, but still, the months without Chinese sales contributed to very low profits for farmers. That’s why in December of 2025, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced $12 billion for the farmers through the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program.
The money will come as a one-time payment and is expected to hit farmers’ bank accounts by February 28, according to Secretary Rollins. Eligible commodities include barley, corn, soybeans, and wheat, which farmers will be paid for per acre. (A full list of eligible commodities can be found here.)
Stehly said the payments are certainly a welcome relief — he’ll get $44.36 per acre of corn, $30.88 per acre of soybeans, and $39.35 per acre of wheat he farms — but the money won’t make up for the profit loss he experienced in 2025.
“It’ll help, but it won’t make me whole,” Stehly said.
The February timeline will also make for a tight turnaround time for farmers who will be relying on that money to get ready for the coming growing season. And, because it’s a one-time payment, it doesn’t offer any sort of continuous relief to farmers who could take years to bounce back from low 2025 commodity prices.
Many economic experts are calling the bridge payments a “band-aid” solution to a more systemic issue. “It’s a very small amount of money without dealing with the larger structural problems in agriculture that we have right now,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
Lilliston pointed to corporate consolidation (when companies are bought up and merged together, decreasing competition in the market), rising input costs and lower commodity prices, and a federal crackdown on immigrant farmworking communities as just some of the most pressing issues facing agriculture today.
“This is kind of a perfect storm, and that’s why people are really concerned about a potential emerging farm crisis, if it’s not already here,” Lilliston said.
The tariffs are just the latest in a long line of trade disputes that have inadvertently put farmers in the middle of them. For example, the grain embargo of the early 1980s initiated by the Carter Administration against the Soviet Union greatly harmed business for U.S. grain farmers, and directly preceded the 1980s farm crisis, wherein thousands of farmers went bankrupt.
“Tariffs, regardless of who puts them on, are really hard on agriculture,” Stehly said. He’s been farming since the 1980s and experienced firsthand the effect of the grain embargo. He said the 2025 trade wars felt similar to what the grain embargo did to his business.
“When [the federal government] starts using my commodity as some sort of leverage, some sort of weapon, I’m the one that suffers,” Stehly said. “And this time is no different.”
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