John: Farm bankruptcies were already on the rise when president trump's trade war added to the financial pressures on America's soybean farmers.

To hear what's on their minds this harvest season, special correspondent Megan Thompson visited two farmers in Minnesota.

Megan: Mother nature has been kind this year to Ryan Mackenthun, who farms about 2200 acres of corn and soybeans near brownton, Minnesota.

Great weather has meant better-than-average yields, and the sun was shining during his soybean harvest in early October.

>> When you can get a run of a week straight of, you know, 80s weather with nice wind, I mean you can combine a lot of beans.

The weather's just been fantastic.

Megan: What's not fantastic?

Just as Mackenthun brings his crops off the field, the world's largest soybean consumer, China, has stopped buying American beans.

>> It's really nerve wracking.

The looming tariffs over us have made it just difficult to predict anything.

Megan: Ed usset is a grain market economist at the university of Minnesota.

>> This is harvest time.

And traditionally, our biggest sales are from September to the end of the calendar year.

Megan: And usset says, the biggest chunk of those sales usually go to China.

>> Over the last decade, we've routinely sent a billion bushels, to a billion-two, just to China every year.

That represents 25% of our total soybean demand in the united States.

Megan: But since may, China has bought zero American soybeans, after the Chinese government slapped tariffs on them, a retaliatory move in the trump administration's ongoing trade war.

And as demand plummets, so does the price.

Caught in the middle are famers like Ryan Mackenthun, whose great-great grandfather started this farm in 1887.

When we visited, he was just finishing up combining his first field of the morning.

Most every year, he puts his soybeans into big storage bins on his farm and sells them throughout the year - trying to eke out a bigger profit, when and if the price rises.

But this year, he's reversed course completely and is selling his haul right away to the local grain elevator.

>> So on that load I had 371 bushels of soybeans, got paid $9.13 a bushel.

That's a dollar below what I got for most of my beans last year.

>> My fear is that the price is even going to get worse and worse as we go along if we don't have that demand for soybeans.

Megan: Mackenthun is fearful because he's seen that happen before - in 2018, a similar trade war pushed prices down to around $8 a bushel.

But it means he's selling his soybeans for less than what it cost to produce them.

With the prices of fertilizer and farm equipment ever-increasing, he figures he's losing about $100 per acre, or about $90,000 on his soybeans.

>> It's overwhelming on how to manage all these costs when we plant on good faith that the market will be there to support all our costs.

So, yeah, it's it's emotionally demanding to try to balance all of it.

Megan: Just a few miles away, Bob Lindeman is also veering off his usual harvest plan.

>> With the beans, we normally would sell right off the field.

We're putting them into these bins.

Megan: Unlike Mackenthun, Lindeman's holding on to most of his beans, crossing his fingers the market will improve.

>> Oh it is for sure a risk you know, putting them in, the market could go down.

I'm hoping that we can get some of these tariffs taken care of.

Megan: But Lindeman doesn't have a place on his own farm to store the soybeans, so he's renting space from his neighbor, which will increase his costs.

>> Right now we're using one, two, three, four, possibly five bins on his farm site.

Megan: Not selling now means he may need to take out a federal loan for the first time in more than a decade to help pay his bills.

And when he does sell, it will take a lot of time and labor.

>> I'll be hauling a load every second to third day from now until next fall, just to get it all emptied out I really don't want to be doing that, but, uh, we need to try and make every cent extra we can this year.

Megan: Ed usset, who advises farmers on these types of complicated decisions, says they're used to factoring in risk, but this level of uncertainty is making those decisions exponentially harder.

>> There's a difference between uncertainty and risk.

Risk is something you can measure.

Uncertainty.

Is this trade war going to be resolved in the next month, six months, one year?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Megan: In September, on a call with Chinese president XI jinping, president trump discussed tik Tok, not soybeans, and has threatened to cancel an in-person meeting with XI later this month.

In the meantime his administration is said to be putting together a multi-billion-dollar bailout package to help make up farmers' losses.

>> And we're going to take some of that tariff money that we made and we're going to give it to our farmers.

Megan: Ryan Mackenthun appreciates the help, but.

>> Nobody likes a bailout.

It's a short-term band-aid, we need long-term fixes.

Megan: And he's worried about long-term damage to the export markets.

Because China has now found other trading partners in Argentina and Brazil.

Ed usset's also concerned.

>> China is learning something.

They have an incredible appetite for soybeans.

And they can feed all their needs from South America.

That's what they're learning right now.

Megan: Farmers want to sell more of their products here in the U.S.

And are hopeful about a trump administration plan to boost biodiesel made from American soybeans.

>> Renewable diesel.

It is expanding quickly in the United States.

But it's not covering that gap anytime soon.

Megan: And so as farmers in Minnesota move on to harvest their corn crop, they want their leaders in Washington to understand what's at stake.

>> Well, I'd say let's not worry quite as much about tik Tok and this and that.

Let's worry about this ag sector.

You keep agriculture healthy, it keeps a lot more jobs.

Keeps a lot more people financially set throughout the United States.

>> When farmers are profitable, we spend our money on new equipment, which turns around and helps our economy.

To do that though we need profitability.

We need certainty.

We need a future a vision of a future where farming will be someday.

Megan: For pbs news weekend, I'm Megan Thompson in brownton, Minnesota.