Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

Cinematically-minded Iowans of middle age or older recall two films set in Iowa in the 1980s. The best remembered and most beloved was the Kevin Costner’s ode to baseball sentimentality, Field of Dreams.

The other was Country starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard, a hard-edged look at the farm crisis that gripped the Midwest during the decade. Country personalized the worst agricultural downturn since the Great Depression, costing Iowa more than one-quarter of its farm ownerships and reducing farm land values by 70 percent.

The opening scenes of the 21^st century version of Country already are running. Corn and soybean prices have fallen almost 40 percent. Iowa farmers are enduring a drop in income of more than 25 percent since 2002. The effect isn’t limited to the countryside; the closing of Tyson Foods processing plant at Perry as well as a sequence of layoffs at Deere & Co., Firestone, and other implement plants have cost almost 2,000 Iowa manufacturing workers their jobs.

Longtime agricultural banker Terry Hotchkiss, chairman of the American Bankers Association agricultural and rural bankers committee, said farm lenders “feel like they are looking over a cliff with regards to the agricultural economy.”

Economic predictions are as risky as political prognostication, but a good guess is that even a recession in agriculture will widen the have/have not gap in Iowa between rural and urban counties. Urban centers like Polk County and the Iowa City-Coralville-Cedar Rapids corridor, with their diversified economics that have drifted away from dependence on agriculture, can continue to thrive. But consolidation of agriculture is likely to accelerate in rural counties, adding to the already-depressing tableau of closed schools and empty storefronts in formerly thriving farm towns.

The long-term problem for Iowa farmers is that cliff—the one Hotchkiss fears farmers and their bankers may plunge over—may be wider and deeper than it was during the twentieth century downturns in the 1930s and again in the 1980s. In those days, American farmers, their capital boosted by government subsidies, could work their way out of trouble by exporting to war-torn and grain-short countries.

Today, Iowa farmers live in a far different world. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which during the Cold War was America’s best customer for wheat and corn because of communism’s chronic inability to feed itself, now is the world’s largest wheat exporter. Hungry hogs and cattle in China can munch as contentedly on Russian wheat as on American corn.

The threat isn’t confined to the Old World. In the western hemisphere, Brazil has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse, outproducing and out-exporting American corn and soybeans. China, the world’s largest importer of corn and soybeans, didn’t wait to see if Donald Trump can bring his tariff chaos back to the White House. In 2022, China signed a new grain trade agreement with Brazil and the results hit American farmers with the force of a derecho.

Brazil sold $58 billion worth of corn and soybeans to China in 2023, easily outpacing American sales of $34 billion. Along the way Brazil dethroned America’s “King Corn” as the world largest corn exporter. With that export mojo at its back, Brazil this month has announced a record soybean crop, which combined with expected record or near-record U.S. crops can be expected to keep prices depressed through next year.

Corn prices, which had recovered to the $6-$7 range in 2021-22 after the Trump administration tariff debacle, promptly fell below $4. Soybeans also did a look-out-below, dropping from $15-$16 per bushel in 2021-22 to less than $10 by mid-2024. That means Iowa farmers (and the Iowa economy) will take a $15 billion cash haircut at the end of this year.

It gets worse. Since the first Arab oil embargo in 1973, the U.S. had relied on grain exports—particularly soybeans—to generate favorable trade balances to pay for the oil and U.S agriculture delivered with the regularity of Caitlin Clark three-pointers.

The larger U.S. economy has undergone a readjustment, as well. For the 2023-24 export year, the export falloff and Americans’ increasing taste for foreign foods at the supermarket (particularly diet-conscious fruit and vegetable eaters) generated a $32 billion agricultural trade deficit. That generated such a shock that Iowa Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley broke with the MAGA-mania for tariffs that has gripped his own party and issued a trade mea culpa at a Congressional hearing in June.

“I hope I have a reputation of being a free trader,” said Grassley, patriarch of a longtime Butler County farm family, during a Senate Finance Committee hearing in June. “I’m in the minority in Congress on this point. I wish the country as a whole would learn a lesson from the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 that were supposed to help protect American agriculture.”

Smoot-Hawley, of course, caused the bottom to fall out of agricultural markets as the Great Depression slid to its nadir. Three years later the new administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, urged on by his Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace of Des Moines, wrote and passed the first of eighteen Farm Bills. Ever since, Farm Bills have provided a measure of financial cushion for American farmers.

Unfortunately for Grassley, the master of Mar-a-Lago is not prone to taking advice from anybody, even a seven-term senator who still takes an occasional turn in the tractor and combine. Trump no doubt thinks his electoral victories in Iowa in 2016 and 2020, and his comfortable lead in early 2024 polls, outweighs any alternative wisdom based on agricultural economics. In that spirit, Trump is barreling ahead this campaign with an economic “plan” centered around a new 60 percent tariff on Chinese products. The expected Chinese response would hand Brazil another huge grain export market win, at the expense of Iowa farmers.

If Trump-loving farmers have forgotten (or never paid attention in history classes) about the effects of past tariffs, they have fresh memories of the $28 billion in taxpayer dollars Trump forked over in 2018 when China responded to Trump’s tariffs by taking their corn and soybean business elsewhere. Farmers no doubt expect Trump to do similarly if he returns to the Oval Office and if agriculture doesn’t recover, as it certainly won’t if Trump makes good on his promise to impose a 60 percent tariff on China.

But Trump hasn’t said a word about agriculture since he won the Iowa Republican caucuses in January, and the Republican Party’s 2024 national platform doesn’t even contain the word “agriculture.” Trump’s convictions this year on various forms of business fraud attest to the questionable likelihood of the man keeping any kind of promise, real or implied.

The Farm Bill, traditionally a source of refuge for farmers in stormy economic times, is a shaky shelter now. Unless an unexpected miracle happens before September 30, a second deadline for extending the five-year bill passed in 2018 will pass with no action other than a stopgap six-month extension of the current bill.

The problem is that ideological extremism has done in the coalition that long united urban Democrats and their support for low-income food assistance with rural Republicans and their need for farm subsidies. Cranky hard-right “Freedom Caucus” Republicans have balked at the $1 trillion-plus cost for the new Farm Bill. They aren’t likely to be charmed by a Congressional Budget Office score showing the bill cost $45 billion more than advertised.

But if Congress dallies long enough, it may well have a genuine economic emergency to deal with. University of Illinois farm economist Carl Zulauf notes that in the mano-a-mano competition with Brazil, the South American nation has a crucial advantage. While urban sprawl steadily reduces America’s cultivatable acres, deforestation can allow Brazil to add more farmland and enhance the gains it has made in developing its internal transportation infrastructure to match the traditional logistical advantage enjoyed by the U.S.

Zulauf wrote earlier this year, “uncomfortable strategic questions confront the U.S. and U.S. agriculture. It is problematic that the US can expand exports when harvested land cannot be increased. U.S yield growth is not dominant vs. the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is expanding harvested land.” That gloomy prediction is not likely to be repeated at next month’s annual “America Needs Farmers” celebration in Iowa City, or at the World Food Prize in Des Moines, where agrarian tub-thumpers annually proclaim how “Iowa farmers feed the world.”

Zulauf added a comment certain to send shudders through the farm lobby: “trends suggest the US is in the process of giving up its historic role as a supplier of basic food staples to the rest of the world.” 

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Top image of corn field is by Anek Sangkamanee, available via Shutterstock.