Things got so bad last year when farmers couldn’t find buyers for their goods that they had to destroy their rotting crops. In November, Reuters interviewed Louisiana farmer Richard Fontenot, who said he and other farmers had no other choice but to destroy their crops.

“No one wants them,” Fontenot said in a telephone interview. As he spoke, he drove his tractor across a soybean field, tilling under his crop. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain.

China purchased $12 billion in soybeans from the U.S. the previous year, which is the estimated size of the payout farmers will get when this is finished. For this year, anyway. Expenses for grain and soybean farmers are skyrocketing as grain silos are at capacity and the companies that own them have spiked storage fees because of the rising demand. 

Iowa is being hit particularly hard, as everything from corn to pork is taking a hit. Experts say Iowa will lose between $1 billion and $2 billion in the next year. In fact, U.S. farms are going bankrupt at alarming rates.

Nevertheless, these rural voters continue to support Donald Trump, despite dabbling in that dreaded socialism to keep their farms afloat. How long is this sustainable?