Two months after a National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) study revealed U.S. farmers are paying double for some crop production products compared to Brazil, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley wants President Trump to turn the same pressure campaign he’s aimed at pharmaceutical companies on the seed and chemical industry. The Republican lawmaker sent the ask to Trump, arguing American farmers deserve the same fight the administration has waged on behalf of U.S. drug consumers.
In a note shared on Truth Social this week, Grassley made that appeal directly to the president.
“President Trump, I ask you to do for American farmers what you have done for consumers of pharmaceutical products,” Grassley wrote.
Grassley laid out what he sees as the core problem in blunt terms, saying American companies that produce seed, fertilizer and chemicals are selling those same products overseas, and particularly into Brazil, at “great discounts unfair to the American farmer.”
Those input price disparity findings between the U.S. and Brazil were released in a study commissioned by NCGA, one that took the ag industry by storm, with farmers saying the study only confirmed what they felt for years.
The Study Behind the Ask
Grassley’s post leans directly on the Kynetec analysis NCGA commissioned, which compared what U.S. and Brazilian corn and soybean growers paid for seed and crop protection products from 2023 through 2025. AgWeb first reported on those findings this summer, and the gaps were hard to ignore:
- U.S. corn seed prices averaged 68% higher than Brazil’s
- U.S. corn insecticide prices averaged 87% higher
- Some fungicides cost more than double what Brazilian farmers paid
- Many herbicide comparisons approached double Brazilian price levels
Those figures held up even after Kynetec adjusted for taxes, currency swings and purchasing power — meaning exchange rates alone don’t explain why an American farmer’s input bill looks so different from a Brazilian farmer’s for what is often a comparable product.
NCGA Chief Economist Krista Swanson has said the timing matters as much as the size of the gap. Farmers lock in seed and crop protection purchases months before they know what the crop, or even the market, will actually deliver, and unlike input costs, the price of corn and soybeans doesn’t come with a “Made in the USA” premium attached.
Swanson has also pointed to market structure as a bigger driver than currency: Brazilian growers generally have wider access to generic, single-active-ingredient products, while U.S. farmers are more often buying premium premixes from the major global manufacturers.
Why Grassley Is Framing It as a Pharma Problem
The Trump administration has spent much of the past two years pushing drugmakers to close the gap between what Americans pay for prescription drugs and what other countries pay for the same medications, using public pressure and trade leverage to squeeze down U.S. list prices.
Grassley’s argument is that farmers are living a version of the same story — American-made inputs sold cheaper abroad than at home — without the same White House attention. If that pressure worked on pharmaceutical companies, Grassley’s message suggests, it should work on the seed and chemical industry too.
While Trump didn’t say if he’d follow-through with Grassley’s ask, he simply posted Grassley’s message on Truth Social, without any explanation or clues on what’s next.
NCGA Leadership Has Been Building This Case for Months
The senator’s post gives new political weight to a case NCGA has already been making to its own industry partners. NCGA First Vice President Matt Frostic, a Michigan corn farmer, has said the organization plans to use the study to push for more pricing transparency from input suppliers, to support policies aimed at improving U.S. competitiveness with Brazil, and to press for changes to how countervailing duty cases account for the public interest — a nod to the ongoing fight over proposed duties on imported glyphosate.
“It’s important we push back, and find that margin for that American farmer,” Frostic has said. “We’re also here to work with the industry to come up with answers. This isn’t a finger-pointing session. They need to understand there’s little or no margin in what family farmers are making, and it cannot continue or the landscape will dramatically change.”
NCGA President Jed Bower, an Ohio farmer, has echoed that frustration while acknowledging what input innovation has meant for yields.
“It sure doesn’t look like we’re the low-cost producer anymore,” Bower said. “They’ve brought tremendous innovations that have allowed us to raise these incredible yields. But when we’re being gouged, it’s just sad.”
Swanson: It’s Not About U.S. Farmers Using More
The debate got a fresh round of data this week when Swanson joined AgriTalk PM to talk through where the study goes from here.
“We know that US growers produce roughly double the corn per acre as Brazilian growers and use fewer inputs per land area, but yet they’re paying more for those inputs, which makes it come out kind of similar on a per acre per bushel basis,” Swanson says. “The Food and Ag Organization of the United Nations actually has data on input usage, and it shows that growers are applying far more pesticides and fertilizer per hectare in Brazil than they are in the US.”
That data point reframes the entire debate, Swanson told AgriTalk’s Michelle Rook.
“This story of cost, it’s not about US farmers using more. In fact, they’re using way less,” she says. “It’s a story about paying more per unit for less of that input that ends up coming out similar on a per acre or per bushel basis.”
Swanson also the efficiency U.S. farmers bring to the field is real and valuable, so the question is whether that value is making its way back to them.
“US farmers are just doing what they do very well, which is continuously producing more with less,” Swanson tells Rook on AgriTalk. “We have this amazing story of productivity and efficiency, and there’s value in that. So what we’re really trying to ask is how much of that value reaches the farm gate. And we just talked about profitability and farm margins, and right now it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of value getting back to the farm gate. And so that’s the question that we are trying to dive into in this study.”
Asked what needs to change to narrow the gap between input costs in Brazil and the U.S., Swanson said the answer isn’t as simple as pointing to regulation or exchange rates.
“There’s a lot of pieces factoring into that,” she says. “We know that some of this is regulatory, some of it is market structure, but it seems to us that these gaps are far too big and consistent to be those things alone.”
What’s Next
Grassley’s public appeal puts the input-pricing debate squarely in front of a president who has shown he’s willing to use tariffs, public pressure and trade leverage on agricultural issues before — including with Brazil directly. Whether that translates into action on seed and chemical pricing remains to be seen, but for corn and soybean growers watching margins shrink, the fact that the message reached Truth Social at all marks a shift from an industry study to a political flashpoint.
NCGA has said the goal of its analysis was never to point fingers at input manufacturers, but to start a broader conversation about transparency and competitiveness. With Grassley’s post, that conversation just found its way to the Oval Office.
