Trump destroyed ag trade during his first term, too

The largest agricultural relief program in Bank of North Dakota’s century-long history – a half a billion dollars – just happened because of bad trade policies by the Trump Administration as he is fully and unquestionably backed by North Dakota’s U.S. Rep. Julie Fedorchak, U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven.

On March 17, 2026, North Dakota’s Industrial Commission gathered to confront a crisis that had been building for years. The verdict: the state needs another $100 million to keep its farmers afloat.

With that vote, the total commitment of North Dakota’s state-owned Bank of North Dakota to its beleaguered agricultural community reached $500 million. It is a staggering sum for a state of fewer than 800,000 people, and it reflects a farm economy under siege from the cascading consequences of federal trade and foreign policy decisions made hundreds of miles away by the Trump Administration in Washington, D.C.

The enormous question: If the state didn’t have to institute this astronomical loan bailout for bad trade policy by Trump, unchallenged by Fedorchak, Cramer, and Hoeven, how could these dollars have been used to help a much broader spectrum of North Dakotans?

A Program Born of Crisis — and Pushed to Its Limits

The 2026 Farm Financial Stability Loan Program did not begin as a $500 million program. It started as a $300 million initiative approved by the North Dakota Industrial Commission in November 2025 — itself an extraordinary measure. A companion program, the 2026 Grain Inventory Loan Program, added another $100 million, bringing the combined original commitment to $400 million.

Applications opened December 9, 2025, at noon. Within weeks, the pace of applications was alarming. By late February 2026, nearly 600 agricultural producers had applied for close to $480 million in relief — a figure that dwarfed the Bank of North Dakota’s previous record program of $190 million and signaled that the original funding would be exhausted well before the June 30 deadline.

“It has ramped up significantly,” said Don Morgan, CEO of the Bank of North Dakota. “It might run tight again.”

The commission’s response was to transfer up to $80 million from the underutilized Grain Inventory Loan Program into the Financial Stability program — and then, on March 17, to add another $100 million outright. The Grain Inventory Program, which had originally been allocated $100 million to help farmers hold surplus crops until prices improved, had attracted only 10 applications totaling approximately $7.7 million, reflecting the degree to which the financial stability crisis had overshadowed grain storage concerns. With the remaining $12 million from that program also folded into the stability fund, the total commitment now stands at $500 million.

How the Loans Work: Below-Market Rates and Extended Terms

The Farm Financial Stability Loan Program is designed to provide targeted, below-market relief to North Dakota farmers and ranchers who can document an operating shortfall in 2024 or 2025, a decline in net worth during those years, or an existing 2024 Agriculture Disaster Relief Loan. Borrowers must be North Dakota residents whose primary occupation is farming or ranching, and they must demonstrate the ability to repay.

The key financial terms are designed to provide breathing room. The Bank of North Dakota’s portion of any loan carries a fixed interest rate of 3.75% for five years — well below the bank’s base rate of 7% and the approximate 4.3%–4.4% all-in rate available to borrowers. The BND portion may constitute up to 75% of the total loan amount. Individual loan limits are set at $3 million for chattel (equipment and livestock) loans and $6 million for real estate loans.

Loan proceeds may be used to replenish working capital, convert recent operating losses into structured debt with extended repayment schedules, or restructure existing term debts. Up to 2 years of interest-only payments are permitted, followed by principal and interest payments on amortization schedules stretching up to 10 years for chattel loans and 25 years for real estate. There are no prepayment penalties and no default interest rates — a deliberate design choice intended to encourage participation and reduce stress.

Farmers do not apply directly to the BND. Applications flow through local banks and credit unions, which partner with the state institution. 

As of March 16, 2026, just under $93 million had been approved and distributed. Demand is concentrated in central and eastern North Dakota. Foster and Bottineau counties have received the most funding, with $7.9 million and $7.1 million respectively. Stutsman County has more than $20 million in applications pending approval, with over $5 million already distributed.

The Tariff Trap: How Trade Policy Hollowed Out Farm Markets

To understand why North Dakota’s farmers need half a billion dollars in emergency loans, it’s necessary to understand the state’s profound dependence on export markets — and the scale of what has been lost.

North Dakota’s agriculture industry generates an estimated $41.3 billion in annual business volume and supports more than 123,000 jobs, according to North Dakota State University. The state ranked ninth nationally in agricultural exports in 2023, with $5.4 billion in overseas farm sales recorded by the USDA’s Economic Research Service — and Agriculture Commissioner Goehring estimates that an additional $7 billion in agricultural trade, much of it with Canada, goes untracked in those figures – so an estimated $12.4 billion in trade sales that have been lost. 

“We export the vast majority of what we produce,” said Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union and a farmer himself. “North Dakota gets hit hard.”

The Trump administration’s sweeping tariff strategy, announced in early 2025, triggered immediate retaliation from the United States’ largest trading partners. China imposed a 10% tariff on U.S. soybeans and a 15% charge on corn. The European Union, responding to steel and aluminum tariffs Trump placed on them, raised levies on American beef and poultry. Canada — the source of nearly $4 billion in cross-border agricultural commerce with North Dakota — imposed its own retaliatory measures.

The soybean market, which had anchored North Dakota’s farm economy for decades, was especially hard hit. China had historically purchased roughly half of U.S. soybean exports — and, according to reporting from Civil Eats, as much as 70% of North Dakota’s soybean crop. As the trade war intensified, China stopped buying American soybeans entirely. In January 2025, soybean prices in the Northern Plains stood at approximately $9.50 per bushel. By early September, they had crashed below $8.50 per bushel.

Farmers Knew Disaster Policy From Trump’s First Term … But Voted For Him Again …

This is not the first time North Dakota’s farmers have lived through this cycle. During Trump’s first term, the 2018 trade war with China caused grain to pile up in bins and sent prices tumbling. The federal government ultimately paid out $28 billion in trade war compensation across two rounds of Market Facilitation Program payments — money that, as NDSU analyst Shawn Arita noted, came from taxpayers rather than from markets. As one North Dakota farmer told PolitiFact in December 2025: “Do I want a government check? Hell no. I want my money to come from the market, coming from somebody giving me a fair price for my product.”

Despite that, North Dakota’s farmers still voted for Donald Trump by a margin of more than two to one, also despite Trump being a 6-time bankrupted, 34-time felony business fraud convicted candidate. Many farmers continue to be repeatedly hoodwinked by the false pretense that Republicans are better for the economy than Democrats: They’re not. Out of the last 12 recessions, 11 of them were under Republican presidencies.

NDSU’s Agricultural Risk Policy Center estimated that U.S. crop farmers lost $44 billion in 2025 as a result of the trade war’s market disruptions and elevated costs. John Deere’s profits fell 35% and the company laid off more than 2,200 workers. The Case IH New Holland plant in Fargo shed 200 jobs. And North Dakota farmers discovered that the tariff pain cut both ways: they faced retaliatory tariffs on their exports while simultaneously absorbing tariff-driven cost increases on the inputs they need to farm — fertilizers largely imported from Canada, pesticides, and machinery.

According to NDSU analysis, tariff rates exceeded 20% on some pesticides, approached 17% on some fertilizers, and reached 16% on tractors and farm machinery. The result was a devastating squeeze: commodity prices collapsing while production costs remained elevated from years of inflation.

In response to the market losses, the Trump administration announced a $12 billion bridge payment program for affected farmers — a program that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed as a bridge to new trade deals. But a coalition of 56 agricultural organizations wrote to Congress in January 2026 saying that the payments did not come close to offsetting total losses and that “extreme economic pressures are threatening the long-term viability of the U.S. agriculture sector.”

The Argentina Factor: A $40 Billion Loan and Its Costs to American Farmers

If the trade war represented a blunt wound to American agriculture, the Trump administration’s financial relationship with Argentina delivered a more surgical one — and it struck at the very markets that North Dakota farmers were counting on to survive.

Beginning in October 2025, the Trump administration organized approximately $40 billion in financial support for Argentina — consisting of a $20 billion currency swap arranged by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and discussed plans for an additional $20 billion in private bank loans contingent on political developments in Argentina. The administration has described the support as bolstering the government of Argentine President Javier Milei, an ideological ally of President Trump.

The problem, as American farmers quickly identified, is that the United States and Argentina compete directly in global agricultural markets. Both are major exporters of soybeans, corn, wheat, beef, and oil. When the U.S. committed to Argentina’s financial rescue, the South American country responded by dropping its soybean export tax — a move that allowed Argentine farmers to sell soybeans to China at substantially lower prices than U.S. producers. China, already boycotting American soybeans in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs, promptly pivoted to Argentina.

“The frustration is overwhelming,” said Caleb Ragland, president of the American Soybean Association. “The farm economy is suffering while our competitors supplant the United States in the biggest soybean import market in the world.”

Then came the cattle question. In late October 2025, Trump publicly suggested that the United States could purchase beef from Argentina in order to lower grocery store beef prices for consumers. The remark triggered immediate backlash from the American cattle industry — and multiple “limit down” days in U.S. cattle futures markets, costing American ranchers millions of dollars in paper losses before a single pound of Argentine beef had been imported.

The White House subsequently moved forward, announcing plans to quadruple the tariff-rate quota for Argentine beef from 20,000 metric tons to 80,000 metric tons annually — a move that would expand low-tariff Argentine imports well beyond the existing 2% share of U.S. beef imports.

Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said the plan “only creates chaos at a critical time of the year for American cattle producers, while doing nothing to lower grocery store prices.” Even Republican lawmakers from cattle-producing states broke publicly with the president. Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon described the proposal as “flying like a lead balloon,” noting the double irony: “After the Administration loaned $40 billion to Argentina, and China is buying all their soybeans from Argentina instead of from the U.S., the suggestion we need to buy more beef from Argentina” compounded the damage.

Cattle industry experts pointed out that U.S. ranchers had been in a historically rare profitable position in 2025, recovering from years of low returns during a natural herd-rebuilding cycle. “I think the argument the industry is making is, ‘Let us have one good year,'” said Becca Jablonski, an agricultural economist. The Argentine beef proposal threatened to undercut that recovery. “It’s a feeling that you’re selling us out to a foreign competitor,” said Christian Lovell of Farm Action.

There are also food safety concerns. A beef cattle extension specialist at Cornell University, Adam Murray, noted that Argentina, while officially free of foot-and-mouth disease, supplements its domestic meat supply with imports from regions that the USDA considers affected by the disease. Industry groups have warned of the risk that improperly segregated beef could introduce foot-and-mouth disease to the United States, which would be catastrophic for the entire domestic livestock industry.

In February 2026, the United States and Argentina signed a broader trade deal in which Argentina agreed to eliminate barriers on more than 200 categories of U.S. goods, while the U.S. agreed to drop reciprocal tariffs on 1,675 Argentine products. The deal also opens the door for Argentine beef imports into the U.S. under government quotas — reigniting the ranchers’ concerns that had briefly subsided.

The Ledger of Losses: Farm Bankruptcies Rising Nationally and Regionally

The financial distress reflected in North Dakota’s loan program is part of a national reckoning. According to data compiled by the American Farm Bureau Federation and U.S. district bankruptcy courts, Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies — the specialized bankruptcy chapter designed for family farmers — totaled 315 filings in 2025, a 46% increase from 2024. That marked the second consecutive year of rising farm bankruptcies after a four-year downward trend.

The Midwest bore the heaviest burden, with 121 Chapter 12 filings — a 70% increase from 2024. The Southeast followed with 105 filings, up 69%. The increases in individual states were dramatic: Wisconsin saw a 700% increase in farm bankruptcy filings. Iowa rose 220%. Missouri climbed 167%. Minnesota jumped 300%. Arkansas, the nation’s leading rice-producing state, recorded 33 filings in 2025 — more than double the prior year and the most in the state in the 21st century.

The USDA estimates that total U.S. farm debt will rise 5.2% to a record $624.7 billion in 2026, with interest expenses alone projected to reach $33 billion annually. The American Farm Bureau reports that crop farmers lost $34.6 billion in 2025. Working capital across the farm sector is forecast to decrease 9.2% in 2026 compared to 2025.

Joe Mahon, regional outreach director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was clear-eyed about the trajectory for North Dakota farmers, too. “We saw a kind of a mini-boom in farm incomes right around the pandemic and post-pandemic time, but now we’re on about two, going on three years of weaker farm incomes. So it’s really prolonged periods of low income that lead to an increase in bankruptcies. And in fact, that’s what we’re kind of starting to see now,” he said in October 2025.

A North Dakota lender quoted anonymously in a Minneapolis Federal Reserve Agricultural Credit survey put it more starkly: “Farmers are suffering this year. If prolonged into 2026, we could see some fail.”

Bankruptcy filings, experts note, are a lagging indicator — a last resort after all other options have been exhausted. They do not capture the far larger number of farms that quietly close, sell land, or consolidate without ever entering bankruptcy proceedings. The USDA’s own Farms and Land in Farms report estimated that the total number of U.S. farms fell by 15,000 between 2024 and 2025, continuing a decades-long consolidation trend. Minnesota alone lost an estimated 1,300 farms in 2025.

A Compound Crisis: USDA Staffing Cuts

The Trump administration’s reduction of the USDA’s workforce has created operational barriers for farmers trying to access federal assistance programs. Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, noted that the USDA employed at least 20,000 fewer staff as of early 2026 than it did on the day Trump took office in January 2025 — a reduction that has thinned the county-level office presence that farmers depend upon to navigate federal programs. Bipartisan former agriculture leaders wrote to Congress warning that the combination of “tariff-driven cost increases, disrupted markets, denied labor pool, and defunded ag research and staffing” risked widespread collapse of the American agricultural sector.

What $500 Million Buys — and What It Doesn’t

North Dakota officials have been careful to frame the loan program as a bridge, not a rescue. The loans do not forgive debt; they restructure it at lower interest rates and extend repayment timelines. They buy time. Whether that time produces a recovery depends almost entirely on forces over which North Dakota has no control: commodity prices, the resolution of trade disputes, weather, and interest rate trajectories.

Senator John Hoeven admitted in October 2025 that the Trump administration’s proposed federal farm aid package — which he expected to exceed $10 billion in taxpayer funds— would not help farmers break even. Despite that, Hoeven, Fedorchak, and Cramer have done nothing to challenge Trump’s overreach of tariffs and other trade policies. Without restored export relationships, particularly with China, the structural underpinning of North Dakota’s crop economy remains in serious jeopardy. 

Farmers Helped Create The Monster

For North Dakota’s farmers — many of whom voted for Donald Trump by a margin of more than two to one, despite Trump being a 6-time bankrupted, 34-time felony business fraud convicted candidate — the experience of the past 14 months has been a study in political dissonance. Multiple farmers interviewed by NPR and other outlets in spring 2025 described feeling blindsided by the pace and scale of the trade disruptions. “This is not what I voted for,” one farmer reportedly told an interviewer in the High Plains area.

Greg Lardy, vice president for agricultural affairs at NDSU, urged farmers to manage not just their finances but their mental health, noting the layered pressures of financial stress, market uncertainty, and the memory of the 1980s farm crisis that still haunts rural North Dakota. “From a mental health standpoint, if they’re feeling financial pressures here, in addition to working with their lenders they really need to be in tune with mental health professionals and the services that are available.”