Kennard, Nebraska, feels a long way from Beijing or even Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as the United States<\/a> and China<\/a> remain locked in a trade war, the Cornhusker State and its farmers like Scott Thomsen are caught in the middle of the conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomsen, a fourth-generation farmer who farms corn, cattle and soybeans, was preparing to harvest soybeans planted last winter \u2013 at a moment when China has stopped purchasing American soybeans in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “China has not bought a single export cargo of beans so far this year, which is not very typical,” Thomsen told ABC News on his family’s farm in Kennard, in eastern Nebraska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “When China quits buying, our prices go down,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n China is the world’s largest soybean buyer, importing more soybeans over the last five years than every other country combined, according to the American Soybean Association.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the seven years leading up to the 2018 trade war during the first Trump administration, roughly 60% of all U.S. soybean exports went to China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, Beijing is turning to South America, and particularly to Brazil, for soybeans amid trade negotiations with the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For American farmers who export their harvests directly to Asia, the evaporation of Chinese demand for soybeans — at a time when fertilizer and other inputs have become more expensive — could potentially be devastating, and lead to bankruptcies and foreclosures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s just a massive shock to our markets,” Cory Walters, a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska, told ABC News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In conversations across eastern Nebraska and in Washington, D.C., where some farmers lobbied lawmakers and the Trump administration for financial assistance ahead of the harvest, more than a dozen farmers told ABC News they felt like bargaining chips between the U.S. and China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They said they were worried about how the potential crisis could reverberate across rural America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’re in the middle of the worst economic downturn that I’ve seen in my 50 years,” John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said at a regional meeting in Beatrice, Nebraska, last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Agriculture is our foundation here in Nebraska and many states in the Midwest,” Don Schuller, a corn and soybean farmer, told ABC News. “If agriculture is failing here everything is going to fail.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n