MY PHOTOGRAPHIC GOAL on a recent morning trip to and from neighboring Kenyon was simple enough: Photograph spring planting. But it wasn’t until Randy and I left this small Goodhue County town that I spotted field work underway.
On the drive over from Faribault, I saw a guy picking rock with a rock picker. He had uncovered an oversized rock, too big to move. That led to a brief conversation about our childhood rock picking experiences. Rock pickers were kids like us, not machines. They did not yet exist.
We assessed, as we headed east, that the absence of farmers in fields meant they’d either finished spring planting or had not yet begun due to no-tillage farming practices.
Once we left Kenyon, heading southwest into Monkey Valley, a picturesque rural area of woods, rolling hills and valley, creek, the North Fork of the Zumbro River, farm sites and fields, a tractor came into view. I must pause here to explain that Monkey Valley, as local lore claims, was named after monkeys that long ago escaped from a traveling circus into the valley. True? I don’t know. But it’s a good story.
I found that first farmer, pulling a roller across the land leveling the earth, just before the gravel road wound into the woods of Monkey Valley. I realized how much farming has changed in the decades since I left rural southwestern Minnesota. There’s more specialized equipment. Bigger implements to work more acres. Different methods of farming that are more environmentally-friendly.
As we followed the gravel road, our van kicking up dust on an especially windy morning, I admired the distant dense woods nestling a farm field under a semi-cloudy sky. Patches of blue peeked through the gray of building rain clouds.
Soon we happened upon the Hauge Old Stone Church built in the 1870s, a place we’ve previously toured during an annual open house. We stopped only long enough for a photo. No meandering among the graves this time as we are wont to do when coming across a country cemetery.
Farm sites hug the road here in Monkey Valley. While many are well-kept, some show the marks of time, like an abandoned silo standing next to the walls of a collapsed barn. I always feel melancholy in the presence of barns gone, their ruins like rural gravestones.
Not far ahead, life teemed in a flock of wild turkeys. I exited the van, moved slowly toward them, hoping to sneak closer for a better photo. But, like all wildlife, they are tuned in to danger and quickly dashed across the road from one ditch to the other. Never mind me and my photographic wishes.
Traveling on back gravel roads requires a slower pace. A sign posted on a roadside tree instructed: SLOW UR (sic) ROLL.
Continuing west toward Faribault, we slowed our roll for a herd of Holsteins fenced in the cow yard at Donkers Farm. I hold a special fondness for cows. I spent my formative years in the barn, scooping silage, pushing a wheelbarrow full of ground feed, feeding cows and calves, bedding straw, forking hay, shoveling manure, carrying milk pails and more. That imprinted upon me the value of hard work, of a farm family working together, of a rural way of life.
All across southern Minnesota, farmers prep the land, apply fertilizer, sow corn and soybeans. They invest not only their time, efforts and finances in the land, but also their hopes. Hope for timely rains. Hope for good growing weather. Hope for an eventual bountiful harvest. And then hope for a good market with high commodity prices.
So much hinges on hope. I see that on this day, on this drive past the fields and farm sites of southern Minnesota.
© Copyright 2026 Audrey Kletscher Helbling
From words on a government website to soybean markets & a crisis in rural America October 15, 2025
Tags: agriculture, America, China, commentary, farm crisis, farming, messaging, opinion, rural America, rural Minnesota, soybean market, soybeans, tariffs, trade war, United State Department of Agriculture
WHEN I FIRST READ the message bannering the United States Department of Agriculture website during the current government shutdown, my jaw dropped. In a two-sentence statement, “The Radical Left Democrats” are blamed for the closure of the federal government. How unprofessional, I thought, to so blatantly put politics out there on a website designed to help America’s farmers. But then again, why should this surprise me?
United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is doing the same in a video message blaming Democrats for the shutdown. She expects this to be broadcast in airport terminals. Many are opting not to air her clearly political statement. And they shouldn’t. It’s unprofessional and wrong in more ways than I can list, no matter what your political affiliation may be.
But back to that message on the USDA website. It goes on to say that President Donald Trump wants to keep the government open “and support those who feed, fuel and clothe the American people.” Now that is certainly a noble statement at face value, one we could all applaud. Who doesn’t want to support our farmers? But in the context of what the President has done to farmers, the statement seems laughable.
Here in the heartland, farmers have lost a major market for soybeans, my state’s top agricultural export. China has stopped buying soybeans from not only Minnesota, but America. That’s billions of dollars in lost income. And all because of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, begun by the man who slapped tariffs—now averaging 58 percent—on Chinese imports with a threat to increase that to 100 percent. I’m no economist. But even I understand China’s retaliatory tariffs and actions to tap other markets for soybeans. They went to Brazil and Argentina.
And now President Trump proposes sending $20 billion in aid to Argentina, all tied to an upcoming election there. Why would we bail out a country exporting their soybeans to China while our own financially-strapped farmers are suffering because they’ve lost a key market? This makes no sense to me. Again, I’m not an economist or a politician, simply an ordinary American citizen, with a farm upbringing (and who decades ago freelanced for the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association), questioning the logic of any of this.
Even without the Argentinian component tossed into the mix, there’s more. President Trump has proposed an aid package for farmers to help them get through the financial crisis he created via his tariffs and the resulting trade war with China. That aid would come from the money collected from tariffs. Now I know farmers—my dad was one—are fiercely independent and would rather have a market for their cash crops than government aid. If not for the tariffs…
As the harvest continues here in Minnesota, I can’t help but feel for those who work the land, who continue to face so many uncertainties, financial challenges and stressors. Interest rates on loans remain high. Market prices remain low. Land rents continue to rise. Equipment and other costs are high. And on and on, including the loss of the long-standing soybean export market to China, which quite likely may never be reclaimed.
This is becoming a crisis situation for farmers—those who feed, fuel and clothe Americans. From fields to small town Main Street, rural America is hurting. And politically-biased blame words published on a government website aren’t helping.
© Copyright 2025 Audrey Kletscher Helbling