Geopolitics may affect Midwest farmers in the US, but they don’t necessarily blame Trump

share_windows This article appeared in Crikey on April 20 2026.

Australia is much more import-dependent than the US when it comes to fertilisers and fuel, which explains why Prime Minister Albanese has made it a priority to secure a deal with Indonesia to source the fertiliser needed by Australian farmers. 

But that doesn’t mean that American farmers do not worry about the war in Iran; it’s just that their main concern is more about the war’s impact on their input costs rather than on supply. This was made abundantly clear to me during my recent three-week stay on a farm in central North Dakota. 

I last visited Ted and his family in central North Dakota about a month before Trump won his second term in 2024. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Ted and his folks voted for Trump. 

When I visited them again this month, they were living with the aftermath of Trump’s return, yet how they made sense of this offers some food for thought.

Last week, I went along with Ted and his family to the main livestock auction of the year, to which he took 170 grass-fed yearlings to be auctioned. The result: the sale price was “even better than my wildest expectation”, with each animal fetching an average of almost $3,000. 

Livestock is only one part of Ted’s mixed farming operation. With the help of his two grandsons Nick and Xavier, he runs a farm of around 2,700 acres, growing mainly wheat, corn and soybeans — the latter two for industrial use — and some pinto beans. He has a further 3,000 acres of pasture land for grazing and hay. 

With the annual cattle sale having gone so well, Ted is now turning his thoughts to getting things ready for the planting season, but the oil crisis in Iran is making some farmers rethink what to plant this year. While corn and wheat need a lot of nitrogen, soybeans don’t, given that soybean plants usually fix their own nitrogen. 

The key to this decision-making process is the projected price of fertilisers. Ted told me that he expected fertiliser prices to go as much as 50% higher than normal, or worse, to double. 

Luckily, as a prudent farmer, Ted had pre-purchased his fertiliser for the coming season before the war began, but he knows people around him who have yet to purchase their fertiliser for this year: “They’re going to be in trouble.” 

Like everyone else, Ted pays a lot of attention to news about what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz, hoping that the crisis will be resolved as soon as possible. If, come next year, the hikes in fuel and fertiliser prices are still a problem, he may consider switching some of his crop from corn to beans. 

Ted is also worried about the price of fuel. Farmers like Ted rely heavily on diesel. He had purchased some diesel for less than $3 per gallon before the war, but he doesn’t have a big in-ground tank, so he fears he may have to pay more when he orders more; currently it’s priced at over $4 per gallon:

“Around here, apart from the purchase and maintenance of farming machines, the three big-ticket cost items for businesses like ours are fertilisers, fuel and seeds.”

But he understands that farming is about living with uncertainty. Ted’s grandson Nick, though still only 23 (but poised to take over from his grandpa’s business), is already well aware of the risky nature of being a farmer. “Farming is a bit like gambling. No matter how well you plan ahead, you can’t plan for all contingencies.” Nick gave me an example: 

“Sure, we’ve already bought our fertilisers, which means we’re ahead of the game in comparison with some other people. But if there’s no rain or not enough rain, fertilisers are no use anyway.”

His grandpa agrees, saying jokingly, “That’s why I don’t need to go to Las Vegas. I can gamble doing what I do.” 

But at no time have Ted, his wife or his grandsons blamed Trump for the uncertainty caused by the war on Iran. To Ted, Trump is doing what he needs to do:

“The Iranian government is evil and its regime has killed so many of its own people. Trump is just doing things other presidents should have done but haven’t.”

Ted lost quite a bit of income from his soybean crop due to China’s decision to stop buying soybeans from the US as part of the tariff war between the two countries. But despite the financial loss, Ted and Patricia do not believe their president was failing to look after Americans’ business:

“Yes, when the soybean price dropped, we felt the loss greatly. But now we’ve been able to expand our soybean market. There have some new soybean processing plants being built in our area. The soybean cooking oil made from our local soybeans goes to Europe, the soybean meal/pulp from making that oil is made into pellets and sent to Malaysia and even Australia as fish food. So whether China buys our soybeans is no longer the driving point any more.”

His wife agrees:

“If China suddenly says we’re not going to buy soybeans from the United States, and instead we’re going to buy from Brazil, then say China buys all of Brazil’s soybeans. But France has been buying from Brazil, and they’ll look around and say ‘Well, the Brazilians have sold their soybeans to the Chinese, but we can buy them from the United States.’ It’s a world market, and I don’t think there’s an excess of soybeans in the world. These soybeans are going to go somewhere. It’s just going to be a different somewhere than it has been. So, we’re not terribly concerned about it. Those who were worried about it are the politicians. They’re screaming and yelling and making it worse than it really is. They’re using the issue to criticise Trump. In the short term, it hurt — the price was quite low for quite a while. But the demand is coming back from different places. It took a while for the market to adjust itself.

Both Ted and Patricia believe it’s important to remember the big picture, and on the whole, they believe Trump’s tariffs have helped Americans:

“They [the Chinese] were putting tariffs on our products. We didn’t have an even playing field. That’s what Trump was upset about, and he should be.”

There are doubtless more twists and turns yet to emerge in the saga of economic uncertainty caused by the Iran war, and even if this does turn out to be the beginning of the end of the war, farmers like Ted and Patricia are still likely to be staring down the barrel of increasing costs for some time to come. What’s noteworthy is that, be it natural disasters, the global market, Iran or China, some farmers seem to see all these as an inevitable part of running a farm.