DAYTON, Wash. — Back in the New Deal era, the Northwest's mighty rivers were dammed, allowing barges to cheaply bring grain from the wheat fields of eastern Washington to the coast for export.
Today, at ports along the Snake River, trucks unload grain to five-story-high bins along the banks. Most barges that pull up to the terminals carry the equivalent of 150 semitrucks worth of grain downriver to Portland.
Typically more than 90% of all the wheat grown here ends up in countries like Japan, Korea and the Philippines, where it's used for noodles, confections and crackers. This is how it's been for as long as Jim Moyer can remember. His family first started farming along the rolling, fertile Palouse region of Washington in the 1890s.
"You can see the house and the buildings," Moyer says, walking through a newly planted field of spring wheat above the family's old farmhouse and barns. "They've been there for well over a hundred years."
To his west, snow is melting fast off the Blue Mountains on the remote Washington-Oregon border. These last few weeks have been drier than he'd prefer.
It's never been easy out here, but right now, like almost never before, things feel like they're on the brink. Wheat prices have been stubbornly low for years while inflation continues to be high.
"A combine now is a million dollars, a tractor is 500- to 750,000, a sprayer can be $750,000," Moyer says.
And it's not looking like the tariffs will bring those prices down.
"The assumption was that it would have been done strategically, with some thought and planning," Moyer says. "We need certainty."
Farmers are still recovering from the first Trump trade war
Uncertainty is something people across America's heartland are talking about, whether it be wheat farmers in states like Washington or Montana, or corn and soybean growers in North Dakota and Indiana. It's yet unclear what farmers stand to gain from the second Trump administration's trade policies. Across the rural Midwest and West, plenty of farmers still fly Trump 2024 flags over their barns, but quietly worry his latest trade war will bankrupt them.
The U.S. government spent decades building overseas markets for crops like soybeans and wheat. Now all those agreements are in limbo.
In Washington state, Jim Moyer says wheat farmers are still recovering from the trade war in Trump's first term when the popular Trans-Pacific Partnership was torn up. He's worried that irreparable damage has already been done with trade deals that took decades to build.
"If you turn the relationship off, it's a lot harder to turn it back on and get that back when, in the interim, the person that you've traded with, they've found somebody else," Moyer says.
Asked if there's a feeling of disconnect right now between the White House and farm country, Moyer replied: "You know, I don't know. I try not to go there; I don't have much control over it."
There's still broad support for Trump in farm country
People here don't want to talk politics much right now with everything so polarized and with tariffs being on, then pulled off, then back on. Washington may be a blue state in national politics, but there is only one county east of the Cascade Mountains that hasn't voted for Trump in three cycles since 2016.
"Obviously farm communities are pretty much Republican," says Byron Behne, a merchandiser with the Northwest Grain Growers, a farmer-owned cooperative in Walla Walla, Wash.
Behne grew up on a wheat farm near the Grand Coulee Dam. He says farmers are puzzled by the White House rhetoric, especially after Trump said on his social media platform that farmers should get ready to supply America, and to "have fun."
"Even the people that are some of his strongest supporters were kind of looking at that and going, what does that truly mean?" Behne says.
The Northwest states — Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon — have some of the highest wheat yields in the world. More than the U.S. could ever consume. Behne says it would be hard to abruptly downscale all of this or slow down or stop exporting.
A lot of things farmers also need, from tractor parts to fertilizer, have to be imported.
"You can't just build a new factory to produce that stuff here," Behne says. " I mean, I understand that's the stated goal by the administration, but that stuff doesn't happen overnight."
It would equate to a generation of pain, Behne says.
Why farmers are worried
Farmer Jim Moyer, who recently retired as a scientist and dean at Washington State University, worries that a lot of his neighbors won't survive if the uncertainty persists.
"Next year it's not going to be pretty," Moyer says. "Farming will be changed forever."
This is dryland wheat country. Most farmers don't have much, if any, irrigation and they can't just easily switch crops either.
The anxiety is palpable out here. Just over the state line in Oregon, Paul Reed and his family are trying to ride it out and stay upbeat.
"Yup, so most of this my great-grandfather started," Reed says, standing in a field of perfect rows of winter wheat, its stalks about a foot and a half high, lush and green.
Reed is only 20 years old. He's just finishing an associate degree in crop management at Blue Mountain Community College in nearby Pendleton, Ore. He'll be the fourth generation running his family's farm when his uncle retires.
"Yeah it's hard, I mean, everyone tells me you're going in at the worst time," Reed says. "It's probably true, but if we've been able to do it for as long as we have — gotta have hope."
No one out here is spending any money really, investing in new equipment or doing much hiring. Reed's trying not to look at the news.
"It's all talk until it actually happens. I don't spend much of my day worrying about any talk that I hear unless it's starting to become something that's actually going to happen," he says.
Reed is switching more of his operation to grass and lawn turf where he can. He also hopes to send more grain to local feedlots instead of down to the river for export. He's one of scores of farmers searching for some positives, when uncertainty rules the day.
This story is part of American Voices, an occasional NPR National Desk series that explores how President Trump's early policies are playing out across the country.
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