In America’s farm belt, the lowly soybean becomes a litmus test for Trump’s tariffs

With their main buyer now looking to South America for soybeans, farmers in Illinois are getting caught in Trump’s trade war Nathan VanderKlippe International correspondent Decatur, illinois The Globe and Mail Published 2 minutes ago Soybeans are harvested from a field in southern Illinois on Oct. 8. Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail

The soybean rarely rises to any level of public interest in the United States. It is invisible to most consumers, used primarily as animal feed and, increasingly, as the raw material for biodiesel.

But soy has long been a lynchpin of the U.S. agricultural economy and now, in the first harvest since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the crop has b

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