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Far from the showdowns between protesters and ICE agents in urban centers like Minneapolis, farmers in rural Minnesota find themselves embroiled in a different sort of battle.
It’s a fight against rising agricultural costs, surplus crops dragging revenues down and the fallout of an international tariff war that threatens, as a February 3 letter from concerned U.S. agriculture experts put it, a “widespread collapse” of farms and rural communities (1).
“There are few tragedies greater than the loss of a family farm,” the letter, addressed to the House Agriculture Committee — including Minnesota lawmakers Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Angie Craig — states. “We need to honestly acknowledge these impacts to rural America and engage in serious deliberations with the farm community to develop real, long-term solutions.”
Days later, Klobuchar arrived in Mower County — the planned site of an advanced state agricultural research complex — to meet with members of Minnesota farming associations, including those representing soybean and corn growers (2).
She spoke of the toll that President Trump’s tariffs have taken on local farmers, noting one third of the state’s agricultural industry revolves around international exports. That includes China, the top buyer of Minnesota soybeans, which spent $1.7 billion on them in 2024 before cutting off purchases for much of last year in tariff retaliation (3). China has since agreed to resume buying soybeans (1), though Klobuchar added, “it’s still less than half of [what] it was last year.”
“If we don’t have these markets, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” warned Rodney Moe, one of the farming association representatives that spoke with Klobuchar.
While Minnesota is known as the “land of 10,000 lakes,” it’s also the home of what was once a $24.5 billion agriculture industry in 2023 (4). Corn, soybeans and feed grains rank among their top exports — which accounted for more than $9 billion in exported goods in 2023 — and are among those now under threat.
In addition to tariff-induced troubles, a forecasted yield of an astounding 17 billion bushels of corn for 2025 and 2026 — which one local agricultural economist called “the record corn production ever in the U.S.” — caused prices to plummet, while the glut of leftover crops will prove a loss for farmers who lack enough available markets in which to sell it.
“Now you have to reevaluate what you’re going to sell your crop for on the balance sheet,” Minnesota farmer Nathan Collins told MPR News (5). “If you still have crops sitting in the bin or sitting at the elevator, you just lost a lot of money.”
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One solution buoying the hopes of many Minnesota corn farmers involves federal legislation to allow the sale of E15 nationally, 12 months a year. E15 — a blend of gasoline that is made up of 15% ethanol, which is derived from corn — is allowed to be sold throughout the year in Minnesota, but the year-round sale of E15 is not consistently permitted nationwide (6).
Minnesota is one of only eight states legally allowed to sell it year-round and, while Klobuchar touted E15 as a possible new domestic market opportunity, an expected law to open those doors failed to pass in January (7). Congress instead elected to establish an “E15 Rural Domestic Energy Council” committee to “develop legislative solutions to address the crisis facing our nation’s farmers and refiners.”
Amanda Bilek, senior public policy director for the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, said afterward that (5), “We had done our job in trying to get an agreement with a segment of the oil sector just to have the rug pulled out a little bit from under us.”
The plight of Minnesota farmers echoes the hardships their peers face across the nation.
A November 2025 report from the American Farm Bureau Federation warned of “multi-billion-dollar export declines in some of our largest trading markets” and a rise in Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies (8).
In addition, a separate January report from the Federation projected losses of between $60 and $210 per acre for crops including rice, cotton, wheat, corn and soybeans, with net losses over the last three crop years estimated at more than $50 billion (9). In 2026, the Federation projects production costs will rise again.
Those include the costs “for fertilizers, costs for chemicals, for machinery products, for machinery inputs” that have “run up in inflation over the past few years,” according to Shawn Arita, the associate director of North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Risk Policy Center (1).
Meanwhile, stories illustrating the wide-ranging ripple effects of an agricultural downturn are plentiful, from falling farm equipment sales to the shuttering of food packing plants.
Farmers welcomed a $12 billion aid package from the Trump administration last year, but it did little to stop the fiscal bleeding (11). Add to that a shortage of farm labor thanks to Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement (12), with the Center for Migration Studies estimating that “45% of all U.S. agricultural workers are undocumented.”
That said, the letter sent to the House Agriculture Committee earlier this month laid out ways the government could reverse course, including ending tariffs on all farm inputs, repealing tariffs that impact agriculture export markets, negotiating binding trade agreements with other countries, and allowing year-round, nationwide sale of E15, among other requests.
“The policies of this administration have caused tremendous harm to U.S. agriculture,” the letter explained. “But it is not too late to turn this around.”
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Letter from U.S. agricultural experts (1); KTTC (2); MinnPost (3, 11); MN.gov (4); MPR News (5); ABC 6 News (6); The Hill (7, 10); American Farm Bureau Federation (8, 9); Center for Migration Studies (12).
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