Mountrail County Promoter - Latest News

By Michael Standaert
North Dakota News Cooperative 
Farmers are preparing for a one-two punch as trade threats and tariffs by the second Trump administration lead to higher costs and diminishing markets.
While potential tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico have again been delayed until early April, a current 10% tariff on Chinese imports led China to target U.S. agricultural goods with a 10% tariff on soybeans and a 15% charge on corn. 
In response to Trump administration tariffs on aluminum and steel imports from the European Union, the EU countered with tariffs of its own, including raising levies on American beef and poultry. 
Export reliance means bigger exposure 
“North Dakota gets hit hard,” Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union and a farmer himself, said of how tariffs impact the state. “We export the vast majority of what we produce.” 
Watne pointed to a study released by North Dakota State University in January that details how important the agriculture sector is for the state, contributing roughly one-fourth of the state’s economy. 
The sector generates a gross business volume of over $41 billion annually, with $25 billion of that from production and another $16 billion in transport, processing, manufacturing and commodity handling. It also contributes $10 billion in labor income and supports over 123,000 jobs. 
According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, the state exported $5.4 billion in agricultural products in 2023, making it the ninth-largest agriculture-exporting state in the country. 
“Farmers will lose money, so this is an extremely negative thing for us, even when it is just a threat or even if it is short term,” Watne said of tariffs and tariff threats. 
Watne remarked that tariffs and threats lead longtime trade partners like China, Canada and Mexico to adjust their own trade away from U.S. farm products, making them less reliant and reducing markets for North Dakota farmers. 
Greg Lardy, vice president for agriculture affairs at NDSU, and who was raised on a farm and ranch in southwestern North Dakota, said it is hard to generalize about the impacts since there’s so much uncertainty with some of the potential tariffs taking effect. 
“Because of our dependence on export markets, I think there’s a general concern about what the tariffs might mean for the long term,” Lardy said. 
“Especially as you think about relationships that have been built with trading partners. Those relationships have been built over years and years and years of work to get products into certain markets,” Lardy said. 
Agriculture commissioner Doug Goehring, who also farms near Menoken, said it is hard to tell what the impacts will be since there’s so much uncertainty right now, but added that the North Dakota agriculture economy is very integrated with both Canada and Mexico. 
Besides the tracked $5 billion in export sales the USDA numbers show, Goehring said there’s another $7 billion in agricultural trade that doesn’t always get accounted for in the trade statistics. 
“Almost $4 billion is Canada alone,” Goehring said of the cross-border trade. Some of that is manufacturing, services, parts and supplies, and a lot is integrated between companies on both sides of the U.S.-Canada dividing line, he said. 
“Sometimes I think what’s lost on the consuming public, is trade is not a short-term type of issue. It’s a long-term goal. It’s all about relationships, and it takes time to establish those relationships,” Goehring said. 
“You can’t just replace the market, you can’t just go someplace else,” he said. 
Domestic fallback not an option
One suggestion President Donald Trump made recently was for American farmers to focus on selling products domestically if the full tariffs go into effect.