A farmer in Dwight, Ill., loads soybeans from grain bins into a truck so they can be sold. Illinois harvests more soybeans than any other U.S. state.Scott Olson/Getty Images
The last time a Donald Trump administration wrote Elliott Uphoff a cheque, he bought a mini-excavator.
“That’s been one of the best tools I’ve had,” said Mr. Uphoff, who farms 2,000 acres with his father near Shelbyville, Ill. “I fix drainage issues with it.”
Mr. Uphoff is a fifth-generation farmer who has stored much of this year’s soybean harvest in a pair of large bins built on land his family first worked exactly a century ago.
Few of those years have been fraught with as much uncertainty as this one. Illinois harvests more soybeans than any other state and in most years sells 60 per cent of them to foreign buyers. Most go to China, floating down the Mississippi River before passing through the Panama Canal and crossing the Pacific.
But Chinese buyers have vanished, in one of the most dramatic retaliatory steps taken by Beijing since the escalation of trade-war hostilities that followed Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. The U.S. has not yet made a single sale to China from this year’s soybean crop, much of which has already been harvested.
Now, the White House is preparing a bailout for farmers that is expected to nearly equal the size of the US$16-billion “trade aid” package delivered in 2019.
Those who stand to see that cash, though, say it’s not what they are looking for.
“Am I going to take it if it’s offered? Absolutely, because I know my neighbour is,” Mr. Uphoff said.
But like many of those who turn the rich Illinois soil into hundreds of millions of bushels of soybeans, he is unhappy about the prospect.
“I don’t love it,” he said. “Friends and family members see that, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re just getting cheques. That’s how you’re making your money.’ That’s not how I want to be profitable.”
Around Decatur, the central Illinois centre that calls itself “Soy City,” the word among farmers is: “It’d be a lot better if we had the market instead of a cheque coming to us,” said Tim Stock, executive vice-president at the Macon County Farm Bureau. Its main office is in Decatur.
Mr. Stock is worried about what coming months hold. The business of growing crops feels “a little more downtrodden” this year, he said.
Across the U.S., “we’re going to lose farms this year, guaranteed.”
At the same time, pressure on the U.S. government to help is set against an odd set of circumstances. China’s halt to soybean buying has not sent prices plummeting. An Illinois farmer can sell a bushel of soybeans today for nearly the exact same price as this time last year.
That price is nowhere near historical highs. But it’s enough that for many producers, selling at current spot prices will bring a profit, albeit a modest one.
That’s partly because U.S. farmers decided early not to bet on beans. The acreage planted in soy this year is “the lowest it’s been since 2007,” said Michael Langemeier, who is director of the Center For Commercial Agriculture at Purdue University, where he is a professor of agricultural economics.
Farmers opted for more corn instead.
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Still, the current soybeans stocks-to-use ratio – a measure of relative demand – suggests that if China does start buying, farmers are likely to see prices rise.
Given current supply and demand, “they’d be at least 10 per cent higher,” Prof. Langemeier said.
Markets already appear to be pricing in an expectation of at least some eventual sales to China, he said. If those sales remain at zero, prices will almost certainly fall from current levels
For farmers, it has meant this harvesting season has brought a shading of political uncertainty to consequential financial decisions.
Matt Furr, who farms 4,500 acres in central Illinois with his family, has purchased only 10 per cent of the futures contracts he would normally buy to lock in an advance price for his crop.
“A lot of guys just held out, you know, in hopes something would come along,” said Mr. Furr, who like Mr. Uphoff is a fifth-generation farmer.
Often, better prices emerge in spring or early summer. Not this year.
Until now, he said, “nothing’s really materialized.”
Still, he is not eager for the U.S. government to begin writing cheques.
“I think a farmer should be able to stand on his own two feet and not have to have a government to get you through,” he said.
“That being said, I don’t think anybody’s going to turn the money down.”