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Irwin said many farmers in the Corn Belt have been surviving on a series of ad hoc payment programs from the federal government. Next year, producers are slated to receive billions in funding from disaster relief and economic aid programs – including a $12 billion bailout package announced earlier this month that aims to offset losses from low crop prices and the trade war.
Irwin said those payments could push farmers in Illinois toward a small profit instead of a hefty loss.
But, ad hoc payments only go so far, Cowley said.
“It’s not necessarily going to help the fundamentals of, you know, what do we do with the supply of the products that we grow?” Cowley said. “And what does that mean for prices that farmers are going to be paid on the market?”
New year, same trade questions
Economists say that trade uncertainty will continue to be a challenge as farmers make decisions for their operations this year.
Irwin is watching the U.S. relationship with China, the biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans, and the weather in South America through the first quarter of 2026.
Earlier this year, China boycotted U.S. soybean purchases for months to retaliate against the Trump administration’s tariffs. The country later agreed to buy 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in 2025, and 25 million metric tons for the next three years – which is closer to what the country typically buys from the U.S.
But after the first Trump administration’s trade war, China further diversified where it sourced soybeans, namely from South America. Irwin said Brazil is now the dominant soybean producer in the world.
“I think what people are probably as worried about as anything on the trade front is, how much permanent damage has this done in our trade relationship with China?” Irwin said. “Is this just going to be a repeat of the last 2017, 2018, when we permanently gave up market share to South America, principally Brazil?”
While the Trump administration has announced trade agreements with countries like Japan, Irwin said some of the details are still unclear.
“Maybe there will be some nice boosts in our agricultural exports coming out of these trade agreements. But we have to see more specifics and get down to that before we’ll really know for sure,” he said.
This is happening as tariffs themselves are in question. Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering their future in a lawsuit.
For Luis Ribera, economic professor at Texas A&M University, trade in 2026 is hard to predict because it’s heavily political. He said markets don’t know how to react to tariff unpredictability.
“In my world, that’s the big question – is this the new normal? Is tariffs going to be a tool to negotiate with other countries? And looks like that’s the way it’s going to be,” Ribera said.
As other countries retaliate against U.S. tariffs and find other places to source products, some American farmers are putting harvested crops in silos. Ribera said that means farmers have to pay for storage, and they don’t know when crops can be moved.
He said the current market leaves few options for crop growers.
“Producers, they don’t have an alternative or say, ’OK, you know, soybean prices are low, well, we’re going to produce more corn, or we’re going to go into cotton, or we’re going to go into a different type of rotation crops just to take advantage of prices,” Ribera said. “I mean, all across the board commodity prices are low.”