{"text":[[{"start":7.855,"text":"Since Corey Goodhue’s father farmed the land in Carlisle, Iowa, half a century ago, almost everything has grown bigger."}],[{"start":15.071,"text":"The operation now stretches across 3,000 acres. The rear tyre on one of its modern tractors is about eight and a half feet high, towering over the two John Deere 4020s Goodhue’s father bought new in 1967."}],[{"start":29.52,"text":"The margins, however, are disappearing, as trade tensions and weak prices leave their mark on the Midwest and the US’s status as an agricultural superpower."}],[{"start":39.373,"text":"Last year, Goodhue’s farm produced its best soyabean crop on record and still lost money on it. This year, if yields meet expectations and nothing expensive breaks, his entire farm should generate $60,000 in operating income against more than $2mn of expenditure."}],[{"start":57.108,"text":"“Not very awesome right now,” he says, grinning at his own understatement. “I worry . . . is it viable for us to continue?”"}],[{"start":64.24,"text":"Goodhue is far from alone. The American Farm Bureau Federation projects that the country’s farmers will struggle next year to produce the staples that made the US into an agriculture powerhouse, with losses of $138 per acre for soyabeans, $167 for corn or maize, $145 for wheat and $406 for cotton."}],[{"start":85.781,"text":"After more than a century the US is on the verge of losing its place as the world’s leading agricultural exporter."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":93.908,"text":"Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tariffs."}],[{"start":110.778,"text":"With US exports falling and Brazil’s rising — they increased 6 per cent in the first half of this year to hit a new record of $87bn — 2026 could prove the year in which America loses its agricultural ascendancy."}],[{"start":123.84,"text":"Brazil is already the world’s largest producer of soyabeans, beef and poultry and has also displaced the US as the top exporter of cotton, partly because of China switching purchases from one to the other."}],[{"start":133.6,"text":"This transfer of power is not only reshaping the agricultural sector in each country, with altered supply chains and investment patterns, it also has wider social and political repercussions."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":147.042,"text":"America remains capable of producing extraordinary harvests but, increasingly on larger farms, for weaker returns and with greater dependence on government support. In Brazil, the growth of farming has created boom towns and transport and infrastructure bottlenecks, while fuelling environmental concerns."}],[{"start":166.59,"text":"US farmers may soon have to contend with being number two. “We’re no longer the world supplier of soyabeans; we’re the residual supplier of soyabeans,” Goodhue says. “[Customers] come here when Brazil runs out or Brazil has a problem . . .  instead of the other way around.”"}],[{"start":181.646,"text":"Why China looked elsewhere"}],[{"start":183.92,"text":"Over the course of the 20th century, the US turned its fertile land, mechanised farms and dense network of elevators, railways, barges and ports into a tool of global trade dominance."}],[{"start":194.8,"text":"The system allowed the US to produce more grain than it could consume and move the surplus cheaply overseas."}],[{"start":201.061,"text":"China became the customer that made that system pay. As its population grew wealthier and ate more meat, the country’s livestock industry required enormous quantities of soya meal."}],[{"start":212.048,"text":"American farmers planted more beans and invested in machinery, storage and export terminals on the assumption that Chinese purchases would continue to rise."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":220.72,"text":"That relationship fractured in 2018, when Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods. Beijing retaliated against products grown in states that had helped elect him, and purchases of American soyabeans collapsed."}],[{"start":235.147,"text":"“At a whim, our trade agreements are being altered, and all that hard work that has gone to build these relationships, to work in good faith, to try to work through problems, can be erased overnight,” says Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union."}],[{"start":249.12,"text":"American farms could not simply stop producing. Land had been rented or financed, machinery payments still had to be made and seeds and fertiliser had already been bought. In response, the first Trump administration doled out about $23bn in subsidies in 2018 and 2019."}],[{"start":266.353,"text":"“There’s an underlying issue there, right? A supply and demand problem, and sprinkling money on it doesn’t really solve it,” Goodhue says. “We don’t really want the direct payment; we want the trade.”"}],[{"start":280.97,"text":"Instead, China bought more beans from Brazil."}],[{"start":282.417,"text":"Department of Agriculture projections had expected Brazil to overtake the US in global soyabean market share, but only gradually."}],[{"start":290.8,"text":"“And then you see that 2018 trade war, and it’s just like boom,” says Joseph Glauber, the department’s former chief economist."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":298.16,"text":"“They went right up to those projections and then outstripped them,” he says. “By 2020 they had a higher global market share than we were projecting at the time for 2025. It’s amazing. That’s what these trade wars do.”"}],[{"start":310.48,"text":"By the time Trump returned to the White House in January last year, Brazil supplied most of China’s soyabean imports. The relationships, processing capacity and trade routes developed over the previous years had become entrenched."}],[{"start":323.92,"text":"“Five years ago, we lost some consumers of what we grow, our overseas consumers,” says Lehman of the Iowa Farmers Union. “They haven’t come back to be our customers.”"}],[{"start":333.44,"text":"Many complain that the second Trump administration has brought another round of tariffs and trade uncertainty. For farmers, whose planting decisions are made months before a crop is harvested and sold, the rapid changes made an already difficult calculation harder."}],[{"start":350.32,"text":"The administration responds that it has cut a deficit in agricultural trade inherited from former President Joe Biden through measures such as export credits and trade missions."}],[{"start":359.209,"text":"“Far from losing our position, the US is achieving a record-setting $174bn in agricultural exports,” the Department of Agriculture says in a statement referring to its forecast for the 12 months to the end of this September."}],[{"start":371.749,"text":"“This administration is aggressively working to expand existing markets, develop new markets, and connect our hardworking producers with overseas buyers . . .  ensuring our hardworking producers are never reliant on a single buyer.”"}],[{"start":385.73,"text":"The US remains the world’s biggest corn exporter, having reclaimed the position from Brazil in 2024, but its share of global trade of the cereal has fallen over the longer term, from 68 per cent two decades ago to around 30 per cent today."}],[{"start":401.36,"text":"Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins told the FT last year: “I believe so sincerely that there has never been a president in my lifetime, perhaps multiples of lifetimes, that has been more focused and more supportive with the priority of our farmers in American agriculture than Donald Trump.”"}],[{"start":401.86,"text":"The Brazilian Texas"}],[{"start":417.913,"text":"The strength of Brazil’s agricultural sector is not just a consequence of American trade policy."}],[{"start":423.057,"text":"Reliant on imports to feed its population as recently as the 1970s, the South American country has built up a sprawling industry that provides food for much of the rest of the world."}],[{"start":433.65,"text":"Today, its world-leading status as a beef and soya exporter comes on top of its traditionally dominant position in coffee, sugarcane and orange juice."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":442.16,"text":"Raphael Bulascoschi, analyst at commodities brokerage StoneX, says the key reason the country is now on course to supplant the US as the world’s leading agricultural exporter is that much of the country is able to harvest two crops in the same year."}],[{"start":456.32,"text":"“This year-round model helps spread fixed costs and typically improves farm margins,” he adds."}],[{"start":461.52,"text":"In the vast centre-western state of Mato Grosso, where the soya industry has exploded, more than half the land used has a second crop of corn or cotton. Irrigated areas can even reach three harvests. The state is sometimes called the “Brazilian Texas” because of its massive cattle herds, arable plantations and frontier ethos."}],[{"start":481.076,"text":"Brazil’s availability and cheapness of land are also key advantages, particularly in frontier regions, leading to massive economies of scale and efficiency."}],[{"start":490.088,"text":"In Mato Grosso’s municipality of Sorriso, fields stretch along either side of the main highway, interrupted by huge silos and crushing facilities operated by global traders including China’s Cofco."}],[{"start":501.594,"text":"The country’s production of cereals, legumes and oilseeds has more than doubled over 13 years to reach 346.1mn tonnes in 2025, even as cultivated areas increased at a slower rate. Arable expansion into the tropical savannah has been a feat of modern agronomy, involving the treatment of soil lacking nutrients and development of crop genetics suited to the climate."}],[{"start":525.04,"text":"Still, Brazilian farmers are not immune from the geopolitical ruptures that have hurt agriculture everywhere."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":531.94,"text":"The country imports about 85 per cent of its required fertiliser, whose prices have been driven higher by the war with Iran. High domestic interest rates and falling crop prices had already increased financial strain even before the conflict began."}],[{"start":546.608,"text":"Researchers at Indiana’s Purdue University have estimated that soyabean profits in Mato Grosso plumbed a two-decade low of $10 per acre in the last harvest."}],[{"start":556.8,"text":"“The current moment isn’t very encouraging,” says Fernando Pozzobon, whose family has a 3,000-hectare (7,400-acre) estate in Mato Grosso that combines crops, cattle and processing. “The stars are aligning for trouble.”"}],[{"start":570.4,"text":"But Brazil and the US entered the shock from different positions. The South American country had the dominant share of the Chinese soyabean market. American growers had lost that market — making what could look like another bad turn in the commodity cycle into a more existential crisis."}],[{"start":587.81,"text":"“It’s a grim time for a lot of farmers,” says Lehman, of the Iowa Farmers Union."}],[{"start":592.667,"text":"‘We aren’t really growing food’"}],[{"start":594.48,"text":"The loss of export demand has made American farmers increasingly reliant on buyers created by government policy at home."}],[{"start":602.16,"text":"Wendy Johnson farms in northern Iowa, close enough to an ethanol plant to see its steam rising above the surrounding fields. Corn has offered one of the few dependable returns because the plant provides a ready market."}],[{"start":613.76,"text":"“That’s really all that’s saving us at this point right now,” she said when the FT visited in February."}],[{"start":619.956,"text":"The ethanol industry consumes about 40 per cent of the US corn crop, supported by tax incentives and federal rules to blend biofuels into transportation fuel."}],[{"start":629.326,"text":"“We’re really farming for the government, and not really very independently,” Johnson said. “You think of an American farmer as this very independent stubborn man. We might have that persona, but we’re not actually that independent.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":643.44,"text":"In March, amid rising oil prices following the outbreak of war with Iran, the Environmental Protection Agency set the highest overall biofuel-blending requirements in the programme’s history."}],[{"start":654.547,"text":"The EPA has said the rules would create a $31bn market for American corn and soyabean oil for biofuel production this year."}],[{"start":662.64,"text":"The administration has used ethanol to ease the fuel shock more directly. Emergency waivers issued after disruption in the Middle East have relaxed the rules on sales of E15, a petrol blend containing 15 per cent ethanol."}],[{"start":676.08,"text":"Brazil also has blending rules that support ethanol, but most of its production of the biofuel is based on sugarcane, resulting in less impact on grain demand than is the case in the US."}],[{"start":687.556,"text":"The US is becoming “more and more a domestic consumption market for agricultural commodities”, says Adrian Gasparian, a Brazilian who is chief trade officer of trading house Pisces et Granum."}],[{"start":699.04,"text":"“Our farms are becoming more energy sources than anything,” Johnson said in March. “We aren’t really growing food; we’re growing ethanol.”"}],[{"start":706.56,"text":"More scale, fewer farmers"}],[{"start":708.746,"text":"When an American farm disappears, its fields rarely stop producing. They are usually taken over by someone bigger. Scale allows farms to spread the cost of machinery, labour and increasingly expensive technology over more land."}],[{"start":723.013,"text":"But it is also displacing an older way of life."}],[{"start":726.8,"text":"Near Johnson’s farm, for example, the fields are planted but some of the houses, barns and outbuildings that once stood at their centre have disappeared or been left empty."}],[{"start":735.44,"text":"Fewer farms mean fewer families spending money in local shops, sending children to schools and supporting churches, machinery dealerships and other businesses. They also mean fewer farmers with a voice in local government."}],[{"start":748.48,"text":"“We kind of lose our voice in the county,” says Bob Stewart, a fifth-generation Illinois farmer, “because there’s so many fewer farmers.”"}],[{"start":755.04,"text":"Around Sorriso, the trajectory is different. Towns that barely existed a few decades ago are new hubs of wealth, drawing in migrants from across Brazil. “They didn’t exist before, and they’re built around agriculture,” Gasparian says of Sorriso and nearby Lucas do Rio Verde."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":772.48,"text":"But the conversion of vast swaths of the ecosystem to make way for pastures and planting has concerned environmentalists. Mato Grosso means “thick bush” in Portuguese, yet today it ranks among the states with the most accumulated forest loss."}],[{"start":787.727,"text":"Illegal deforestation was among Washington’s justifications for a new 25 per cent trade tariff on Brazil — even though clearances have fallen significantly in the past few years and the country has a strict forest code requiring farmers to preserve part of their land in its natural state."}],[{"start":804.528,"text":"And despite Brazilian agriculture’s dizzying trajectory, farmers complain of bottlenecks in transport infrastructure — few railways and poor road surfaces — that make it expensive to get grains to ports."}],[{"start":816.609,"text":"“Today, freight costs account for 30 per cent of the value of soy,” says Diogo Damiani, president of the Rural Union of Sorriso. “In the US it’s about 10 to 15 per cent.”"}],[{"start":827.12,"text":"As agribusiness has risen to account for about a quarter of Brazil’s economic output, the impact has extended to politics and culture. Its lobby has singular influence in Brasília, while the most popular music nationwide is a genre of country that projects an image of rural life."}],[{"start":843.68,"text":"The political consequences are harder to measure in Iowa, a Republican-leaning state that plays a pivotal early role in the presidential nomination process."}],[{"start":853.182,"text":"Most farmers in Iowa supported Trump. They are also not necessarily opposed to tariffs. Lehman says many would accept a period of pain if it were part of a clear strategy to challenge unfair competition and build better markets."}],[{"start":866.32,"text":"But he says that in Trump’s second term “we’re in a much worse situation on trade issues.”"}],[{"start":870.72,"text":"According to Johnson, many farmers initially assumed Trump’s disruption would eventually produce something better. “Well, they must have done it for a reason,” she recalls people saying."}],[{"start":881.2,"text":"“But the horizon keeps coming, and we are not seeing a lot of hope,” she added. “I don’t think politically you want farmers’ hope to dwindle in the Midwest.”"}],[{"start":894.96,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1784866382_3225.mp3"}