This week, amid an escalating trade war, President Donald Trump announced a 125 percent tariff on China while the country hit back with an 84 percent tariff of its own. This came as a devastating blow for soybean farmers, because China is their top foreign market. In 2024 alone, more than half of all U.S. soybean exports went to China.
Many soybean farmers have been here before. After Trump imposed tariffs back in 2018 during his first term, U.S. agriculture lost $26 billion—nearly $20 billion in soybeans alone. But Trump also emerged from that first trade war with a deal that many farmers celebrated. In fact, many crop farmers in the American heartland helped reelect him in overwhelming numbers.
Caleb Ragland, 38, from Magnolia, Kentucky, who comes from a long line of farmers stretching back 200 years, is one of them—having voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Still, as the president of the American Soybean Association—representing 500,000 soybean farmers across the country—he is deeply concerned about how tariffs will impact him and his colleagues.
In an urgent plea below, he asks President Trump to secure a deal with China, and save the future of farming in America.
My family has been farmers for nine generations, going back to 1808 when my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather cut down trees to build a cabin and barns for livestock, and planted the food they needed to survive.
I can see their gravestones from my home here in Magnolia, Kentucky. My father and grandfather taught me to farm and now I’m paying it forward to my three sons, ages 14, 12, and 9.
In the 1980s, farmers in my area shifted from dairy and tobacco to soybeans as new technology changed the market and made it possible to farm rougher terrain and use pesticides to kill weeds without killing crops. But now, because of the trade war with China, I’m worried we could be out of business by 2027. All that history, heritage, blood, sweat, and toil could vanish with the stroke of a pen.