A new report published this week by 35 agriculture and food groups highlights the scale of US food and agriculture, and the central role it plays in the broader economy. It arrives, however, at a difficult moment, as the very states driving that system have just seen their exports sharply impacted.
The 2026 Feeding the Economy report, published by the Food Industry Association and the American Farm Bureau Federation, opens with a familiar kind of boosterism: nearly 49 million jobs, more than $10 trillion in economic output, and one in five American workers tied to the sector. Those are some substantial numbers.
But what the report doesn’t emphasize is how concentrated that economic backbone really is, or how much strain it is now under in the very regions most exposed to these shifts.
Pull the state-level export data from the report and a pattern emerges immediately. Nebraska generates $40,170 in food and agricultural exports per food-sector worker — the highest rate of any state. Iowa is at $30,738. Kansas at $30,527. North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Wyoming — all export-intensive, all agricultural, all deeply dependent on commodity markets that only function when foreign buyers are buying.
What’s the common denominator? They all voted for US president Donald Trump.
Trump carried Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wyoming by wide margins in 2024 — often by 20 points or more, and by more than 30 in some cases. These are not contested states. They are the reddest counties in the country, growing the crops most exposed to what happened next.
The China Factor
China has been the anchor of much of the American commodity export market for decades. In 2024, it absorbed 46.7% of all U.S. soybean exports, the largest US agricultural export by value at more than $24 billion annually. It was the leading destination for US beef, pork, cotton, and sorghum as well. Basically, it’s tough to argue that the Midwest doesn’t run on that relationship.
In early 2025, the White House imposed sweeping tariffs under emergency powers. China retaliated. The response was surgical and comprehensive. Beijing placed a 34% effective duty on US soybeans, enough to make them prohibitively expensive against Brazilian supply. It allowed the export licenses of hundreds of US beef facilities to expire, effectively closing the market. It stopped buying US corn, wheat, and sorghum entirely. According to the USDA, total US agricultural exports to China are projected to fall 30% from 2024 levels to $17 billion in 2025 — and drop further to $9 billion in 2026, the lowest since the first trade war in 2018.
China’s retaliation hit list
The soybean numbers are the starkest. By late summer 2025, at the start of the US harvest season, China had placed zero orders for new-crop U.S. soybeans. Not reduced orders. Zero. New-crop soybean futures fell sharply over the summer. With break-even costs above market prices, farmers were already losing money even before harvest began.
In North Dakota alone, a University of North Dakota study estimated that a 20% retaliatory tariff on soybeans could cost state farmers nearly $640 million.
Where’s the beef
Beef tells the same story from a different angle. Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska each exported over $1 billion in beef products in 2023. By mid-2025, monthly U.S. beef exports to China had fallen by more than 90%. Most of those purchases had been picked up by Australia, whose beef exports to China surged in the same period. The market didn’t disappear. The American share of it did.
This is the part that doesn’t recover easily. When a buyer pivots, relationships form. Supply chains reorient. Brazil expanded soybean acreage to meet Chinese demand that used to flow to Iowa. Australia did the same for beef capacity to fill the gap left by Nebraska and other states. According to researchers at UC Davis, rebuilding lost market share after a trade disruption will take years, if not decades, and would likely require hundreds of millions of dollars in market development efforts. The 2018–2019 trade war established the pattern: even after tariffs were lifted, U.S. agricultural exports to China never fully returned to where they were before.
Actually, if you look state-by-state, it’s pretty bleak for these commodity producers.
The bill, by state
Tinkering With Policy
There was a policy response from the White House, which was to distribute some $23 billion in direct handouts to affected farmers, the bulk of which went to Midwest row crop producers.
But the 2025 Farmer Bridge Assistance package, the successor program, has again prioritized Midwestern row crops — the very commodities most exposed, yes, but structured in ways that favor large commodity operations over the smaller farms carrying the most concentrated risk. And no federal program compensates for lost market share, only lost revenue in the current year. The relationship damage accrues on its own.
That pattern has held. Federal programs are built to offset short-term revenue losses, not to rebuild lost markets. And it’s market share — not this year’s income — that determines what comes back, and what doesn’t.
The Feeding the Economy report is a document built to argue that the food and agriculture sector is too economically important to be taxed, regulated, or constrained by policy. The same geographic concentration it presents as economic strength is the concentration that made these states so vulnerable when trade policy changed. The report celebrates the export intensity of states like Nebraska and Iowa as a measure of their productivity. In 2025, that productivity had nowhere to go.
The farmers in these states didn’t make a bad bet on an unlikely outcome. They built their operations around a trade architecture that had been stable for decades, in an economy the report says generates more than $10 trillion in value. The administration that dismantled that architecture carried their counties by high double digits.
That’s not irony. It’s the actual cost.