Brett Neibling Says Farmer Markets Are Squeezed by Trade and Costs
Brett Neibling, a Kansas farmer and president of the Kansas Soybean Association, says the current economic situation for farmer operations is tough as soybean exports to China have fallen to around a quarter of last year’s level in the first eight months of 2025. He farms roughly 2,500 acres in Highland, Kansas, and said, “It seems like we’ve got a market around tweets sometimes.”
The strain does not stop at export demand. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March caused a massive spike in oil and fertilizer costs, adding a second hit to growers already facing retaliatory duties on U.S. commodities from major consumers including China after the Trump administration’s global trade war.
Brett Neibling In Highland
Neibling’s farm in the northeast corner of Kansas is not an abstract example. The office on his farm controls grain-bin movement and corn drying, the sort of daily operations that depend on tight margins and predictable input costs. When fertilizer and fuel jump together, those margins narrow quickly for family-run farms like his.
China’s shift away from U.S. soybeans has been severe. From the end of May through November 2025, the United States exported no soybeans to China, and Brazil now provides the vast majority of China’s soybeans. That leaves growers in Kansas and elsewhere with fewer buyers for a crop that has long depended on overseas demand.
China Soybean Sales
The current slide also echoes a recent loss that farmers in Kansas remember well. During the 2018 trade war with China, Kansas farmers lost nearly $1 billion in sales of soybean and sorghum, a scale of damage that frames why current export losses are drawing so much attention among producers.
Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor of law and policy at the department of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said, “We’ve seen soybeans become much more of a geopolitical pawn than a trading discussion, than a market discussion.” For farmers selling into export markets, that means prices and access can shift with policy decisions far from the field.
2018 Losses Return
The immediate pressure on growers is now coming from both sides of the balance sheet: weaker sales abroad and higher costs at home. Neibling said the situation is tough, and his warning carries extra weight because it comes from a producer who runs 2,500 acres and leads the Kansas Soybean Association. For farmers watching the Chinese market, the practical reality is that the buyer mix has already changed, while the cost side has become more expensive at the same time.
