Dependent on foreign sales, U.S. wheat farmers hoping longtime partners stick with them

PULLMAN, Wash – It’s not just importers who are worried about higher prices from tariffs in the U.S. these days. Businesses that rely on exports, like wheat growers, are growing increasingly nervous as well.

This was apparent following a recent trade delegation visit through the Pacific Northwest that included mill operators and grain buyers from four Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Such visits are routine, especially at harvest time. Washington state is the nation’s top wheat exporting state – about 90% of the dryland wheat grown here is trucked or shipped by river barge to west coast ports. These buyers are eager to visit farmers and see the crop up close because they buy so much of it. But nothing right now is routine.

The visit follows President Trump slapping a roughly 20% tariff on imports from those countries and amid concern that they will respond with retaliatory tariffs of their own, potentially driving up costs for American farmers even more.

Trade is all about relationships

Casey Chumrau, CEO of the Washington Grain Commission, the trade group that helped sponsor the tour, says that farmers have spent decades building intricate trade relationships with foreign buyers.

“The commission was founded in 1958 and obviously we’ve been through many different political administrations and we always come back to the relationships we have with our customers,” Chumrau says.

Chumrau says the future of U.S. trade policy may be uncertain, but the farmers’ long standing trade relationships are here to stay.

“I am very confident that we are going to continue to have strong demand,” she adds.

But behind the scenes, it’s clear people are also nervous. Farmers and trade groups across the U.S. right now are trying to reassure their foreign buyers that the U.S. is still a good place to do business despite the current politics and all the volatility.

Jim Moyer, whose family has farmed wheat in eastern Washington since 1891, says American producers need certainty. He’s worried that countries that have long been trading partners with the U.S. are starting to lose patience.

“It isn’t that they will levy retaliatory tariffs necessarily, they might, but that they might just go someplace else,” Moyer says.

The Trump administration says it will send relief aid to farmers if needed, as they did after their trade war in 2018 during the President’s first term. Still, there’s a lot of anxiety in the Pacific Northwest as the harvest is wrapping up.

Across the region, it’s easy to see the U.S. government’s long standing efforts to boost exports from the extensive barge system on the Snake and Columbia rivers to U.S.D.A. labs that operate in conjunction with scientists at Washington State University.

The recent trade delegation, which traveled the length of the domestic supply chain from the fields to west coast ports, got an up close glimpse of new experimental seed varieties being tested at WSU and saw a test kitchen where Northwest wheat is used to make artisan breads and noodles that are in high demand.

But none of the delegates wanted to do on the record interviews with NPR, nor did several other participants who joined for the tour. One respected director at a federal lab the delegates visited had been fired by President Trump’s DOGE team earlier this year. While he wasquickly reinstated after an uproar, it was clear many federal employees locally felt like their jobs are in limbo.

And broadly, like in many other corners of rural America right now, as soon as talk turned to Trump’s actions and the trade war, the atmosphere got tense.

“I’m not gonna get into politics,” says Tom Kammerzell, chuckling, in response to a question about whether farmers are worried about the U.S. moving toward protectionism. “It’s worth paying attention to but these things ebb and flow too.”

Kammerzell’s roots on eastern Washington’s Palouse – the name for its rolling, glacier-carved, fertile fields ideal for growing dryland wheat – go back even farther than Jim Moyer’s. In 1855, Kammerzell’s great grandfather came from Russia to farm.

This year’s wheat harvest has been better than expected considering the fickle weather and dry Spring. But because of the global wheat harvest being good and the resulting glut, farmers locally are only getting about $5 a bushel, Kammerzell says.

“Break even is about $6.50 and it doesn’t take a wizard to figure out that we’re underwater,” he says.

Farmers may not want to talk politics, but Trump’s tariffs are affecting them directly, namely in higher prices for fertilizer. Most of it is imported from Canada. Lingering inflation and supply chain problems stemming from the pandemic are also making equipment prices soar. Kammerzell says a combine can now cost $1 million.

“It’s going to be tough, bottom line,” he adds. “Thank God for crop insurance.”

Since the latest trade war began after President Trump’s so-called liberation day in May, the administration has maintained that American farmers will ultimately benefit from new, America-first trade deals.

But after interviews with farmers in several states in recent months, it’s clear patience is starting to wear thin. It’s been months now of back and forths, tariffs being on, then off again, then a totally new policy announcement on the president’s Truth Social, with few firm agreements signed on paper.

Jim Moyer, who’s also a retired university agronomist, left the recent trade delegation visit in Washington state feeling reassured that local wheat is still coveted and in demand. But he says as the uncertainty wears on, it’s nearly impossible to plan for the future.

“We’re in a period of two or three years of being in an agricultural recession,” he told NPR.

Farmers like Moyer say there’s still a lot of uncertainty and business doesn’t like uncertainty.