Kentucky farmers are caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump's trade war with China.

Last year, China imported nearly a quarter billion dollars worth of Kentucky's crops and livestock.

Our June Leffler traveled to Hickman County and far west Kentucky, where the state's number one cash crop is grown.

This field has recently been planted with Kentucky's highest earning crop, soybeans.

So that right there is the radical, and it's the main root that shoots that first.

Hopefully we can get a good week here of good warm weather that they'll really jump out of the ground and take off and maybe they'll out, outpace any type of pasture insect or stuff like that.

Kentucky farmers sold nearly $1.5 billion worth of soybeans in 2023.

Those beans aren't used for tofu or soy milk.

Our big thing is feeding animals and making sure that we have a good protein source for the animals, which is coming from the soybean meal.

And then those animals then in turn are used for protein source for humans.

Farmer Jonathan Reynolds lives in Clinton, just 30 miles from the Illinois port town of Caro, Kentucky.

Soybeans can end up anywhere.

I mean, we've got the Mississippi River, the Ohio River, Tennessee and the Cumberland.

So we've got a lot of export markets that flow right just a few miles away.

I mean, they're all going down the Mississippi to New Orleans and getting shipped all over the world.

More than half of Kentucky's soybeans are exported internationally, mostly to China.

Yeah, China has the largest hog herd in the world by a long shot.

Reynolds is president of the Kentucky Soybean Association.

The group supports free trade, but Trump tariffs and retaliatory Chinese tariffs could alter the market.

You know, those things that are being charged a tariff, they haven't hit the farm gate yet.

I guess in my my personal perspective, I kind of just want to see how it plays out before I start making any decisions.

You know, big decisions on it.

Kentucky's farmers are always at the whim of things.

They can't control, whether markets and politics they've been through a Trump trade war before.

A Kentucky agriculture economist explains 2018.

For example, when we had our first trade war with China, soybeans exports basically completely stopped.

We watched those prices drop down from something like, you know, $12 to somewhere around $8.

And so that's really the fear that we're in a situation where that could happen again.

Because what happens is if we don't have China buying those beans or we're not sending those beans elsewhere, it's just going to stack up that supply in the United States, and that's going to lower domestic prices.

And then that comes back on the farm.

Producer.

In Trump's first term, after two years of a trade war, he did strike a deal with China to offset losses during Trump's first term.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture passed out more than $20 billion to U.S. farmers.

That could be an option this time around.

Personally, you know, I don't want to have to depend upon the government to bail me out as a farmer.

And so I want to do all I can to mitigate the potential of that.

However, some of the decisions that Congress makes affects my bottom line, and I have no control over that.

So there is the other other side of that coin where if we're unable to control what they're doing and they're tinkering in our markets, we feel like maybe there should be some, some compensation for that.

Reynolds says long term soybean farmers should expand their markets.

His group lobbies for more biofuel options at home.

Looking abroad.

He says India could be a great customer.

Reynolds will tend to his fields in his home town this summer.

Come fall, he'll harvest this patch.

Where exactly these beans will go isn't up to him.

For Kentucky edition, I'm June Leffler.