Rugby, North Dakota soybean farmer Jon Casavant

I’m Jon Casavant from Rugby, North Dakota. It’s a busy time in my neck of the woods, with farmers like me contending with changing weather and fields full of crops that need to be harvested.

Here’s a taste of what life is like in farm country this time of year. Like many farm families, it’s a challenge to balance the demands of the job with raising a family. I like to get up around 6:30 am, make breakfast, and help the kids get ready for school.

When things get busy during harvest, I’m fortunate to have a family that enjoys pitching in.

When they’re out of the door around 8:30 am, I drive 36 miles north to my 2,800 acres of land located near Dunseith. It’s only a handful of miles away from the Canadian border, and mornings can be quite cold in October. While I’m bundled up waiting for mist to clear and dew to dry, it’s a rat race to get equipment ready and repair anything that broke the day before. There’s always something to do — routine maintenance, applying grease, fixing leaks.



When things get busy during harvest, I’m fortunate to have a family that enjoys pitching in. My parents, who are retired, lend a hand, as do two of my brothers. My dad’s first cousin, a retired veteran, also makes time to run one of the combines. Even my 9-year-old nephew helps out during harvest. Outside the farm they have lives, careers, and families of their own, but they sacrifice their time to help this family operation be as productive and successful as possible.

My brother runs the grain cart, which hauls soybeans from the combine to the truck.

My kids also show some interest in the farm, but at 15, 12, and 10 years old, they also have busy schedules with school and sports. Their activities are located in Rugby, which makes it hard for them to help out in our fields in Dunseith and still make it to weekend volleyball games. Thankfully my wife, who works as an occupational therapist in Rubgy, can take them to their games during busy times so I can stay in the field.

But this is not a normal year. I have 800 acres of soybeans, and because of the administration’s trade war, I’m not running them to town.

On days we’re harvesting, there’s normally not much day-to-day variation– morning repairs, combining, moving equipment from field to field, and in normal years, running trucks to town to market our crop at the local grain elevator.

But this is not a normal year. I have 800 acres of soybeans, and because of the administration’s trade war, I’m not running them to town. Instead, I’ll have to store them in the hope that I can sell at a later date at a price that won’t put me in the red. The challenge is, like many farmers in North Dakota, I’ve never had to store soybeans — you can usually sell them right off the field.

In other states, I’m hearing farmers will still be able to still sell their soybeans, albeit at a loss. But in North Dakota, we sell most of our soybeans to China, which ship out of the Pacific Northwest. Orders are being cancelled and trains just aren’t heading in that direction. So we’ve got to find space to store whatever we’re not already contracted to sell, which is a huge amount of soybeans.

I’ve been doing my research and using information published by NDSU to learn how to store this year’s soybean crop. Because they’re harder to preserve in storage, it’s best to keep soybeans in grain bins with big fans that circulate the air. But I was still storing durum from 2017 in my circulated bins, so I recently had to spend several days transferring the durum out to make room for the soybeans. It might not sound like a big deal, but it’s time consuming and something that we’ve never faced before.

It’s just one way the uncertainty of the trade war has thrown a wrench in our plans this year. I looked into buying more bins for storage, but the dealers are being affected by the administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs and are having trouble giving quotes when they don’t even know what their costs are going to be. It’s an example of how the tentacles of this trade war are long. When my bottom line is in question, it affects the whole supply chain, and businesses that are important to our community, like the seed guys and farm equipment dealers, also get hurt.