Farmers face a perfect storm now and it has nothing to do with the weather.

Crop prices remain low. Expenses are rising. Optimism is waning. Much of it could have been avoided had farmers been top of mind with an administration that seems to consider agriculture an afterthought in America.

Farmers have been leveraged for international conflicts from trade wars to real wars with an attitude that farmers will recover like the sun coming out after a storm. But farmers are saying these problems will not go away with the dawn of a new day.

This is particularly harmful to southern Minnesota, a hub of agriculture that includes 1,000 businesses that produced $15.3 billion in revenue distributed throughout the region, according to a report by GreenSeam, the Mankato region’s agriculture development agency.

The barrage has been relentless:

A trade war in early 2025 with China brought retaliatory tariffs from China to reduce U.S. soybean exports. China then turned to Brazil as its major supplier, according to an Associated Press report. While late in 2025, the Trump administration negotiated a deal for China to buy 25 million tons of soybeans a year, that only gets the trade back to where it was.

And the $12 billion bailout did not come close to covering farmers’ losses, according to farm groups. Republicans in Congress say they are planning a much bigger farm relief package.

Farmers still lost almost $75 per acre on the 2025 soybean crop, according to the American Soybean Association.

“When China decided to stop purchasing, we couldn’t find enough other markets to replace those sales,” said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. “We’re still feeling the impacts today. When you look at where soybean exports are today versus where we would normally expect them to be, we’re still running anywhere from 15% to 20% behind normal.”

When the U.S. war with Iran started and the Strait of Hormuz closed, key chemicals and fertilizers needed by farmers skyrocketed in price.

Half the 400 farmers surveyed by the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture in late March said their farm operation was financially worse off than one year ago.

While oil prices have also skyrocketed and may come down, the impact of the war will be long-lasting on farmers, said Seth Goldstein, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, an investment research company.

Middle East facilities critical for exporting oil, chemicals and other commodities were damaged or destroyed during fighting, and it will take time for supply chains to recover, he said.

“Facilities have been hit, like liquid natural gas plants,” Goldstein added. “You are also looking at a big supply crunch in commodity chemicals, which are the inputs for crop chemicals.”

“We burn a lot of diesel fuel,” said Chris Gould, a corn and soybean farmer in Maple Park, Illinois, in a report by The Associated Press. “It’s hard to say if I’m gonna come out ahead or behind on this whole deal. But I suspect I’m going to come out behind.”

Farmers see prices of chemicals, seed, and even tractor parts, rising. A recent jump in the U.S. inflation rate to 3.3% from 2.4% will also likely flow through to farming expenses.

Rising costs were the top limit to growth among agribusinesses including farmers in the recent survey of 300 members of GreenSeam, the region’s agriculture development organization. Some 57% saw cost increases as a top threat to their organization. Only 23% saw a positive outlook.

So, not only are farmers faced with what can be short-term prices going up and down, though mostly down, they face longer-term consequences to recover from economic forces that will not go away anytime soon.

It seems many of these long-term consequences were avoidable by an administration that really does not have its ear to the ground in farming. We would expect New Ulm farmer and Congressman Brad Finstad, R-1st District, to offer that feedback to President Donald Trump on farmers’ plight, but Finstad is so silent to the public, it’s hard to know what he can do for farmers.

He met again with Greater Mankato Growth officials where the public did not have access to hear him. GMG thanked Finstad on his Facebook page for “your willingness to listen, learn and collaborate on solutions that support Greater Mankato’s future.”

We, and the public, have a right to know how Finstad will “collaborate on solutions.” If Finstad is doing something, it’s not apparent.

So far, Finstad’s answer seems to be “trust the president” and all this business will come back, get better. That’s going to be a long wait.