North Dakota

Snow was dusting out of the steel-colored sky as Monte Peterson stared out his home office window at the North Dakota land his family has worked since the 1950s.

“We’re having November weather in October,” the 60-year-old said.

The words were delivered in a no-nonsense deadpan, but a sense of urgency was working through the fourth-generation farmer. The clock was running. Timelines were collapsing. Each unseasonably wet day was a delay, keeping Peterson and his four-man crew out of the 4,500 acres, representing millions of dollars of soybeans, they need to harvest by Halloween.

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The latest escalation in President Donald Trump’s trade war threatens to upend the midterms after putting some of his most loyal supporters in the cross-hairs of China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Consider North Dakota, where Republican Kevin Cramer is seeking to unseat North Dakota’s Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp in a state where Trump pulled 63 percent of the vote and carried 51 of 53 counties. While many congressional Republicans from agricultural states, including Speaker Paul Ryan, have voiced frustration with Trump’s trade tactics, Cramer is betting the farm on the president.

Cramer, echoing Trump, has said confronting China on trade will benefit farmers. Cramer organized an August town hall where Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told farm leaders in the state to trust Trump on trade and look for the long-term result rather than focusing on short-term pains. Trump’s administration, meanwhile, has rolled out a rescue plan for farmers and warned China against retaliating further on agriculture — his voters, largely.

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There is plenty of nervousness over how the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China will continue to affect North Dakota farmers.

Soybeans have been hit hard as international markets are compromised because of trade negotiations and tariffs to countries that traditionally are big buyers of North Dakota soybeans. China is the biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans, so tariffs have affected markets state growers have come to rely on.

Farmers are the eternal optimists. Otherwise, what is the point of farming? asked Colfax farmer Scott Gauslow Tuesday morning as he helped host 17 Philippine soybean buyers at Colfax Farmers Elevator. The delegation then made their way to a nearby farm owned by Vanessa and Paul Kummer to see the growing process.

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In the upper Midwest, the brisk autumn air has already signaled the annual harvest season. But farmers in North Dakota, where an election in two months could be pivotal in the fight for control of the U.S. Senate, are feeling another kind of chill: They fear that President Trump’s trade battles have created lasting obstacles to their livelihoods.

In North Dakota, Chinese tariffs on soybeans have thrown a wrench in the finely tuned production line that makes agriculture a profitable pursuit. Farmers are now betting on high-stakes negotiations that don’t appear to be coming to fruition anytime soon. Although polls show that the president’s support remains strong in this deep-red state, political observers say that the farmers’ plight has complicated Republicans’ hopes of ousting longtime Democratic incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in November.

Soybeans may sound esoteric to city dwellers in Washington, but as a cash crop in this country it’s second only to corn – worth $41 billion last year alone, much of it sold overseas. Earlier this year, China retaliated against the U.S. by enacting tariffs on U.S.-grown soybeans. This was not merely a symbolic gesture: The Chinese are the number one consumer of American soybeans, which they feed to livestock and use for cooking oil. Addressing domestic political pressure to reach an agreement with China, deputy White House press secretary Lindsay Walters put out a statement last month saying U.S. representatives met with their Chinese counterparts and discussed “how to achieve fairness, balance, and reciprocity in the economic relationship.” But these talks did not result in a deal.

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