FARMERSBURG, Iowa >> Like all successful farmers, Suzanne Shirbroun has learned to manage uncertainty.

But President Donald Trump’s near-daily edicts on tariffs and trade threaten to upend all her careful calculations. As the president mulls a revolution in global economics, farmers like Shirbroun, who raises soybeans and corn with her husband, Joe, find themselves in the crosshairs.

Trump’s recent tariffs on Chinese goods will make the herbicide she uses to keep her fields weed-free more expensive. The levies he’s announced on foreign steel and aluminum will raise the already inflation-swollen price of tractors and other farm machinery. And his enthusiasm for increasing taxes on all imported products could ignite a global trade war that boomerangs on American farmers, the principal targets of foreign retaliation in Trump’s first term.

“It’s all a toss-up right now. And that’s what is unsettling here on the farm,” Shirbroun said. “It’s like, okay, we’re throwing all these balls in the air and we don’t know where we’re going to be as far as our soybean and corn markets.”

Trump draws strong support from farm states. And many here endorse his stated goals for tariffs of encouraging the return of lost factory jobs, striking back against “unfair” trading partners and raising government revenue. But the prospect of a trade war sequel has farmers — including those like the Shirbrouns, who voted for him — on edge.

Iowa produces soybeans for China and corn for Mexico, and it depends on Canada for almost 90 percent of the potash fertilizer that makes it all possible. Each of those countries has been hit or threatened with tariffs during Trump’s first month back in the White House.

Shirbroun, who has traveled to Vietnam, Chile, Brazil and Colombia on industry trade missions, worries that the president’s “America First” approach could become a costly turn inward that overlooks farmers’ need for customers outside the United States.

“I’m going to have a lot of soybeans and corn that I need to move. So I don’t want to fold in where we are only looking at the U.S.,” she said. “Our goal is to make Iowa and U.S. soybean farms profitable. And to do that, we need these international markets. We need to keep growing demand.”

Meanwhile, there’s only so much she can control on her sprawling farm. The rains will come, or they won’t. The Mississippi River, which carries her crops to export terminals downstream, will thaw when it thaws. And market prices for commodities will rise or fall depending upon harvests, conflicts and crises far from the Hawkeye State.

There is nothing farmers can do about the president’s frequent ruminations about taxing U.S. imports and the risk that other nations would respond by shunning American crops.

Trump’s remaking of U.S. global economic engagement, however, adds a fresh element of worry as farmers already are grappling with an unforgiving business environment.

Their costs for seed, fertilizer, labor and equipment are rising even as the prices they receive for their crops hover at multiyear lows. Farmers who borrow money to bridge the gap face punishing interest rates of nearly 8 percent, up sharply from three years ago.

After reaching a record high in 2022, net farm income, a broad measure of profitability, fell for two consecutive years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers’ take is expected to rebound this year, largely because of government disaster relief payments to compensate them for damage from hurricanes and other storms.

With costs high and revenue pressured, profit margins are thin.

“That’s the hard part about agriculture. It takes 3 million [dollars] or 4 million worth of equipment for a small-percentage return,” said Joe Shirbroun. “So, you know, why do we do it? Well, we just love the challenge of the crop. And it is stressful some days. And when you get tariffs ... all of a sudden, your market changes.”

Many farmers are responding to the pervasive uncertainty by pausing discretionary investments. The Shirbrouns, for example, usually trade in their giant combines for a new model every two or three years. But not this year.

“We’re holding on to equipment longer. Same thing with tractors, planters, all the equipment. We’re just not going to be able to upgrade as often as we have in the past,” Suzanne Shirbroun said.

Sales of farm equipment slumped last year, long before Trump reentered the White House. John Deere, a maker of tractors, combines and other machinery, said this month that its profits fell by half for the quarter that ended Jan. 26. The company said it expects sales of large agriculture equipment in the United States to remain weak for the rest of the year. Tariffs would only add to the gloom.

In the November election, Trump won Iowa by a 13-point margin, and he remains popular in the farm belt. The Shirbrouns are Trump supporters, though not blindly loyal. Suzanne described herself as skeptical of all politicians’ promises.

But she applauded Trump’s North American trade deal and the partial accord he inked with China in January 2020, which called for the Chinese to dramatically increase purchases of U.S. farm products.

President Joe Biden’s failure to enforce that agreement or negotiate any others, and what she regards as his overzealous environmental regulation, persuaded her to back Trump — even though in his first term he killed a trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would have opened several of the foreign markets she covets.

Like the rest of rural Iowa, Clayton County went hard for the president in 2024. Fully two-thirds of county voters backed Trump, giving him a bigger margin than in 2020 or 2016. One reason: Many here associate the Democratic Party with extreme social views.

“I think farmers are pretty down to earth people that maybe don’t agree with a lot of the far-left ideology. You have a lot of pretty meat-and-potatoes people around here,” said Adam Rahe, a local agronomist and farmer. “This is rural Iowa. You’ve got a male, and you’ve got a female. We don’t have pronouns.”

Shirbroun’s family has farmed this part of Iowa since 1874, when her great-grandfather emigrated from tiny Liechtenstein. The family navigated the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, the two World Wars and the farm crisis of the 1980s. Joe, 60, and Suzanne, 57, took over the farm in 1999 after both had worked for several years as agronomists. They prospered in the years leading to Trump’s first term, before he imposed tariffs of up to 25 percent on $360 billion worth of Chinese goods.

At the time, China retaliated by erecting its own barriers to U.S. goods, including a steep tariff on soybeans. Chinese purchases of American soybeans fell from $12.2 billion in 2017 to barely $3 billion in 2018. Brazilian suppliers rushed to fill orders that once had gone to farmers like the Shirbrouns.

Trump got Congress to approve a $28 billion bailout to cover farmers’ losses, more than three times what the federal government spent to rescue the auto industry during the 2008 financial crisis. Farmers welcomed the help, but chafed at the need for it.

“Who wants to take money when you have the ability to raise a wonderful crop or produce a product and you can sell it? That’s not how a farmer wants to live,” Shirbroun said.

Now, it’s not just tariffs that cloud the outlook for agriculture. The president froze spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development, citing waste in foreign aid programs, which put at risk roughly $2 billion in annual payments to farmers for products such as wheat and soybean oil that are shipped overseas as humanitarian assistance.

The fate of the Agriculture Department’s “Climate Smart” cost-sharing grants, which help farmers afford to plant cover crops, is also uncertain, leaving Iowa farmers waiting for roughly $9 million the government owes them.

The president often expresses his affection for farmers and recently castigated Biden, saying “the last administration hated our farmers, like, at a level that I’ve never seen before.”

But Trump appears sanguine about the potential costs of a broader trade war. Asked by reporters last week about suggestions that the European Union could retaliate for any new U.S. tariffs by banning imports of American farm products, the president was dismissive.

“That’s all right. I don’t mind. Let them do it,” Trump said. “They’re just hurting themselves if they do that.”

In reality, they also would be hurting Iowa’s farmers.

For now, the Shirbrouns are prepared to give the president the benefit of the doubt. The tariffs could be just what’s needed to pry open markets in places like Europe, India and Southeast Asia, Suzanne said. It will be at least April before the president decides whether to go forward with the tariff escalation or not. Until then, farmers like the Shirbrouns hope that Trump’s tariffs are part of a savvy negotiating strategy, not an end in themselves.

As the midwinter snow carpets the fields, the Shirbrouns are preparing for their spring planting. This is the time to repair the tractors, planters and combines that make it possible to squeeze so much food from an Iowa field.

“There’s just a lot up in the air, you know?” Suzanne Shirbroun said. “But I want to stay positive. Farmers are positive people. You have to be.”