Adding war in the Middle East to an ongoing trade war equates to the math not working for farmers.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs have deterred China from buying vast amounts of U.S.-grown grains and soy as well as forced the Eastern power to instead purchase from Brazil. All this while the price of grains has fallen in recent years, and the U.S.-started Iran war has endangered a major trade route for fertilizer ingredients.

“There’s not a producer in agriculture around the world that won’t be impacted,” said CHS CEO Jay Debertin of the continuing conflict.

Debertin and Thomas Halverson, CEO of agricultural lender CoBank, spoke March 30 at an Economic Club of Minnesota event and signaled more challenges to come for Minnesota and Midwestern farmers still recovering from several seasons of decreased revenue.

Big agriculture companies in the state such as co-operative CHS and agribusiness giant Cargill have cut some staff in recent years amid a global oversupply of grains, costlier expenses and increasing pressure from trade spats.

Halverson said his employees often joke that farmers raising “everything with feet,” including beef and poultry, are doing fine in this economy. The same is not true for row crops such as soybeans, he said, and the Midwest is the “epicenter” of this production.

If the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran remains a target during the ongoing war into this summer, fertilizer prices could rise even higher. Iran has threatened ships carrying natural gas and other fertilizer materials, which has caused the price of the urea fertilizer to rise significantly since the conflict’s start in February.

“I find it difficult to find any — frankly — upside to this,” Halverson said of the “very, very significant” impact of the war. “I do see a lot of potential downsides.”

The war has also increased the price of energy and helium used to produce computer chips, Halverson said. It has risked cutting off Middle Eastern countries that receive much of their residents’ food via the Strait of Hormuz from their supply.

“Anyone who thinks that that reopening on a sustained basis of the Strait of Hormuz is like flipping a light switch ... this is not going to be an easy thing to sort out,” Halverson said.

Before the war, the prices of crops such as corn and soybeans have decreased in recent years. Tariffs in the past year under Trump have fueled uncertainty in the commodities markets, with harvests going unsold in the fall as China refused to buy U.S. soy in retaliation.

China turned to Brazil for its supply, and Debertin said Brazil’s agriculture economy has grown significantly since 2000, with harvestable acres increasing by 100 million or so and the country’s farmers improving their crop yield. Halverson said Brazil can sell soybeans for cheaper than the U.S. now.

Trump’s tariffs, Debertin said, haven’t “been good for U.S. agriculture, but there’s been previous administrations that weren’t friendly to trade, either. And we’re going to need to get over that.”

Finding a soybean buyer beyond China isn’t a great option, since no other country buys as much soy as the Asian nation. The U.S., Debertin said, must embrace a new approach to trade.

“Either we want it and we work on it and we work towards it, or we don’t,” he said of trade. “But you can’t just sit.”

Halverson agreed the U.S. needs “a different attitude on trade in this country,” saying the country’s agricultural economy will “de-industrialize” if leaders continue to “make impediments” to its progress. This could hurt all Americans, he said.

“These days, farmers are the recipients of lots of unintended consequences, and one of the unintended consequences of that is the taxpayers of the United States have to continue to write very large checks to support the farmers for things that would have been avoidable if we just had smarter policies in the first place,” Halverson said.

©2026 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.