A farmer in Dwight, Ill., loads soybeans from grain bins into a truck so they can be sold. Illinois harvests more soybeans than any other U.S. state.

The last time a Donald Trump administration wrote Elliott Uphoff a cheque, he bought a mini-excavator.

”That’s been one of the best tools I’ve had,” said Mr. Uphoff, who farms 2,000 acres with his father near Shelbyville, Ill. “I fix drainage issues with it.”

Mr. Uphoff is a fifth-generation farmer who has stored much of this year’s soybean harvest in a pair of large bins built on land his family first worked exactly a century ago.

Few of those years have been fraught with as much uncertainty as this one. Illinois harvests more soybeans than any other state and in most years sells 60 per cent of them to foreign buyers. Most go to China, f

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