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Dave Nuss’s pickup rumbled down the dirt road, dark, rich soil turned up in fields on either side. The 69-year-old farmer gestured to one field then another, commenting on the fortunes of each crop this year. Then he stopped and looked across an irrigation ditch. A trio of sheds — one green, one tan, one gray — loomed in the distance.
It was the former site of his asparagus operation. Once booming, now long since bust.
“We lost all our customers,” Nuss said.
Those buildings represent a loss for the Nuss family and all of American agriculture. It came in the early years of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that offered new markets to some and destroyed them for others, and it reveals why we’re still locked in debates over trade and tariffs decades later: We’ve been getting trade backward for farmers for more than 30 years.
The issue is that since the 1990s, most American trade is a product of big deals with big countries (and often multiple at once, as with NAFTA). It means trade negotiators aren’t just bargaining over what’s fair to asparagus farmers, or even just multiple crops — they’re negotiating across dozens of crops, other agriculture interests aside from farmers, and countless industries spanning manufacturing, mining, technology, and more.
With a line that long, family farmers like Nuss slip to the back. The third generation, Nuss took over a family farm from his dad in Lodi, California, that mainly grew corn, dry beans, and alfalfa. He saw an emerging market for fresh specialty produce in the 1990s and began dabbling.
Asparagus took off, the work was exciting but hard. Nuss harvested and packed his own brand — named after his late father, Reuben — working long days, sleeping in his truck in between.
Then NAFTA hit, opening new markets for American goods abroad, but hammering asparagus. The reason? NAFTA let other countries sell asparagus into America any time of year, even though many countries shield their prime growing season from American imports.
So Nuss faced a flood of asparagus driving prices down, right in the middle of the only prime season for profitable asparagus.
Economists debate the effectiveness of those policies, but for Nuss, skewed competition was devastating. He went into bankruptcy and nearly lost everything. He shifted to planting corn, the only thing he could afford to grow, paying his debts one by one.
In the decades since, even farmers growing prime export crops get hit by big trade with big countries: American dependence on China buying soybeans, rather than selling evenly across many markets, left farmers vulnerable in this year’s trade dispute.
Nuss’s son, Tim, worked in exports at the beginning of his career, and saw how trade deals benefit exporters who want as high of volume of crops leaving America as possible. (Also, global forces calling for high volume, rather than selling food in local or specialty markets, increases the pressure for farmers to get big or get out.)
“How do you break that off,” Tim Nuss said of an individual farmers’ interests, “and negotiate it separately?”
The politics are scrambled, with President Trump’s tariff policies pushing the free-trading GOP toward protectionism, and Democrats traditionally concerned about unfair competition from other countries toward defending free trade. But that also means there’s support from voters on both sides to find a better way.
And there are other ways.
Stephanie Mercier, an economist with the Farm Journal Foundation, said negotiating on individual products with individual countries — many small deals rather than a few large ones across countless economic sectors — can reduce trade-offs. This could also increase American leverage for farmers, by negotiating with a wide range of countries that need America more, rather than a few big ones like China, or blocks like the European Union.
Dave Nuss is in favor of anything that gets farmers out of the back of the line.
“In any deal, there’s always a throwaway,” Dave Nuss said, meaning some interest tossed aside in a compromise for a broader agreement. “The farmer is the throwaway.”
Still, he takes heart in his sons helping him chart a new future. Derek, who has farmed with him for years, Tim, who rejoined after years in exports and tech, and Tyler, who runs an energy company while helping with the farm part time. He also started a podcast with Tim that combines farming with start-up mentality. They’re pursuing more direct business with retailers and restaurants, in addition to traditional food marketing and processing companies.
And they’re diversifying so no one crop can break them. As Dave Nuss keeps driving, he points to rich brown fields destined for tomatoes, garlic, peppers, watermelons, pumpkins, and more.
But no asparagus — that dream didn’t survive American trade policy. Hopefully others can.
Brian Reisinger is an award-winning author and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. His book “Land Rich, Cash Poor,”was named Book of the Year by the nonpartisan Farm Foundation. You can learn more or contact him on X at @BrianJReisinger or at www.brian-reisinger.com
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