A turbulent year
As the dust has settled from combines rolling across Missouri’s cropland, the results of 2025’s growing season are coming into focus, and farmers are reflecting on a season that kept them guessing.
The topics that defined crop production in 2025 often made national headlines: the Trump administration’s tariff policy led to a slump in grain prices as China, the world’s biggest market for soybeans, turned to South America for its supply; even after an Oct. 30 deal restarted shipments, skepticism about Chinese commitment to the deal has lingered amongst producers and agricultural economists.
Meanwhile, farmers anticipated a near-record harvest, and nervously eyed grain storage bins already brimming from years of high yields. By September, they were pivoting again as a late-season drought and an aggressive fungus upset those expectations.
In October, from the seat of his combine on his farm outside of Tarkio, Missouri, Blake Hurst guessed his “yields would be good for corn, decent for beans.”
His early analysis came out right on state average. According to initial numbers shared by Ben Brown, a senior researcher of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri Extension, Missouri corn finished with an average harvest around 178 bushels per acre.
That outperformed the trend number, which is an early season yield estimate, by 6 bushels per acre. “That’s a very strong crop for Missouri,” Brown said.
Still, he conceded, “that doesn’t necessarily mean [the yield] met the expectations of producers.”
Especially in northern part of the state, “the expectations for this crop were very large. This summer they were well above trend, 20 bushels above trend.”
Soybeans also underperformed from summer expectations, with Missouri farms yielding an average of 50 bushels per acre, 3 bushels below what some farmers had hoped for in August. Unlike corn, soybean yields fell not only below summer expectations but also below their trend estimate.
The issue for beans was a late-season drought which hit the state, especially southern portions, following an unusually wet July.
“Soybeans really depend on some moisture in August and early September,” Brown said. “When it comes to our double-crop bean [varieties], we’ve got to have that late-season moisture to get those beans to pollinate and mature, and we just didn’t have that this year.”
The southern rust
The season’s erratic rainfall hindered the corn crop as well, but largely with the opposite issue: uncharacteristically wet conditions early in the season, combined with warm temperatures and high humidity, caused a heat-loving fungus called southern rust to flourish beyond its typical territory, spreading not only in northern Missouri but into Iowa and Minnesota.
Southern rust is one of multiple fungal diseases which overwinters in Mexico and the southern United States, producing “millions of spores on infected tissue. Wind picks up those spores and brings them northward,” explained Oscar Pérez-Hernández, a professor of agronomy at Northwest Missouri State University.
But to see the disease this far north is “surprising,” he said, and requires “a unique combination of high humidity and high temperatures.”
Once it infects a plant, southern rust acts more aggressively than similar diseases such as common rust, which also impacts corn. The disease forms bright orange pustules on plant material.
“You see lesions abundantly on the surface of the leaf,” said Pérez-Hernández. “Then as the disease progresses you see lesions all over the plant, even on lower leaves.”
Pérez-Hernández did not have a quantifiable estimate of yield impacts in the region, but from speaking with producers it appears significant. He often brings classes out to meet with local farmers, and rust came up in nearly every visit, he said.
Hurst, for his part, confirmed “it’s pretty widespread, and if you didn’t apply a fungicide, it hurt the crop, sometimes quite severely.”
Pérez-Hernández said producers “should expect to see [southern rust] again in the future.”
“[With] deviations from regular climate patterns -- earlier springs, later winters, higher temperatures later in the fall -- some pathogens we didn’t see in the past may be able to survive,” he said.
“That, of course, is tied to climate change,” he added.'
An uncertain economic outlook
If rust defined the year in corn, trade was the story in soybeans. China is the world’s largest market for soybeans and the Trump administration’s trade war closed that market to American farmers, causing prices to fall.
On Oct. 30, the administration announced a deal to restart shipments to China and the country pledged to buy 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans before the end of 2025. During November, prices rallied, increasing by about 10%.
But Brown said, those increases reflect a shift in expectations rather than reality.
“The market anticipates these trade agreements coming to fruition…However, Chinese firms keep buying Brazilian soybeans because they are price competitive compared to ours.”
From a consumer standpoint, he said “why [would they] buy a higher-priced product when you have a cheaper alternative?”
Soybean shipments have started leaving U.S. ports for China, but many agriculture economists and farmers remain skeptical the country will entirely fulfill its pledges.
“In the agreement announced by the administration it says, basically, economic considerations can override the agreement,” said Hurst. “So, in other words they are only going to buy from of us if we’re the cheapest. So, they have left themselves an out.”
Regardless of the outcome of this deal, Hurst said China has been investing heavily in South American agriculture for years.
“The Chinese have clearly made the decision that they would rather do business with Brazil than with us, and I think that’s part of our reality going forward,” he said.
On Dec. 8, the Trump Administration announced $12 billion in Farmer Bridge Payments to compensate for the negative impacts of its trade policy. Hurst said farmers would welcome the support, but the situation remains frustrating.
“Clearly, it would’ve been better if we hadn’t put these tariffs on in the first place, and then we wouldn’t have these depressed market prices,” said Hurst.
But he conceded, “the payments help.”
In late November, just before northern Missouri got its first snow, Bob Lager was tinkering in his barnyard off Highway 71 just south of Maryville, putting up equipment and winding down the season.
Lager observed the same patterns reporters by industry watchers this year: a wet July, good yields, the unanticipated appearance of Southern Rust, and the impacts of quick-changing federal policy.
Overall, Lager tends to be an optimist. The “morale of farmers is quite a bit better than it was a few months ago,” he said, “especially with grain prices improving.”
The grim economics currently facing American farmers are simply part of the industry, he said: “like I’ve told a lot of people, farming goes in cycles. Right now, we’re in a low cycle. We had some pretty good years in the past…and in a few years here I think it will get quite a bit better,” he said.
“I tell my sons all the time: ‘it’s not going to be this bad forever.’”
Market watchers will now shift their attention to the weather forecast for South America as the Brazilian growing season gets underway, and the price of grain hangs in the balance.
