© Daniel Acker/BloombergWater floods a cornfield in Malden, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, May 29, 2019. Claims known as prevented plant pay out when farmers are unable to sow crops at all. With unceasing rain keeping farmers out of fields, growers are increasingly weighing how best to get paid and ease the impact from the bad weather and an escalating U.S.-China trade war.
There has never been a spring planting season like this one. Rivers topped their banks. Levees were breached. Fields filled with water and mud. And it kept raining.
It was raining when U.S. farmers, a year into being squeezed out of the world's largest soybean market by the trade war with China, were supposed to start putting down crops. It was raining when President Donald Trump risked starting a feud with Mexico, the biggest buyer of U.S. corn, by threatening to slap tariffs on its exports.
"You hear words like biblical, unprecedented," said Sherman Newlin, a corn and soybean farmer in Illinois.
"That's all true."The storms and rains may soon
lift, but the layers of uncertainty just keep adding up.
Farmers who have lost access to Chinese soy buyers don't see relief on the horizon. Other countries may
chip away at corn exports. With Brazil reaping a bumper crop while U.S. farmers watched the weather, buyers in Asia were
shopping for South American grain.
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