Soybeans Have Been a Top U.S. Ag Export For Decades

(Photo: Gabrielle Nelson/Buffalo’s Fire via the North Dakota Monitor)

(North Dakota Monitor) – Tyler Stafslien is a fourth-generation farmer who’s worked his family’s land in central North Dakota for about 20 years. Roughly half of his 2,500 acres are typically dedicated to soybeans, a major crop in the state and in the Mississippi River Basin. But growing soybeans has become less profitable over the last decade as input costs rose and the Trump administration’s tariff negotiations in 2018 and 2025 destabilized trade and strained farmers’ incomes.

This year, wary of the precarious export market, Stafslien decreased his soybean acres by half.

“We’ve been experiencing in ag, the last couple of years, a downturn in commodity prices, a lot of that related to just a large supply across the globe of major commodities, but then you add this trade war on top of it, and it’s like the icing on the cake,” Stafslien said.

The administration announced earlier this month a $12 billion fund for one-time payments to row crop farmers to offset a portion of their inflation- and trade-related losses in the 2025 crop year.