WINSLOW, Neb./CHICAGO (Reuters) - Midwestern farmers have been gambling they could ride out the U.S.-China trade war by storing their corn and soybeans anywhere they could - in bins, plastic tubes, in barns or even outside. Record floods have devastated a wide swath of the Farm Belt across Iowa, Nebraska
1 / 2FILE PHOTO: A flooded parcel of land along the Platte River is pictured in this aerial photograph at La Platte, south of OmahaFILE PHOTO: A flooded parcel of land along the Platte River is pictured in this aerial photograph at La Platte, south of Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. March 19, 2019. REUTERS/Drone Base MANDATORY CREDIT -/File PhotoBy Humeyra Pamuk, P.J. Huffstutter and Tom Polansek
"I’ve never seen anything like this in my life," said Tom Geisler, a farmer in Winslow, Nebraska, who said he lost two full storage bins of corn."We had been depending on the income from our livestock, but now all of our feed is gone, so that is going to be even more difficult. We haven’t been making any money from our grain farming because of trade issues and low prices."
Soybeans were the single most valuable U.S. agricultural export crop and until the trade war, China bought $12 billion worth a year from American farmers. But Chinese tariffs have almost halted the trade, leaving farmers with crops they are struggling to sell for a profit.As prices plummeted last year amid the ongoing trade fight, growers, faced with selling crops at a loss, stuffed a historic volume of grain into winding plastic tubes and steel bins.
"That's the toughest pill to swallow," Jorgenson said."This could end their career of farming and the legacy of the family farm."
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