U.S. farmers finishing their harvests are facing a big problem — where to put the mountain of grain they cannot sell to Chinese buyers.

For Louisiana farmer Richard Fontenot and his neighbors, the solution was a costly one: Let the crops rot.

Fontenot plowed under 1,000 of his 1,700 soybean acres this fall, chopping plants into the dirt instead of harvesting more than US$300,000 worth of beans.

His beans were damaged by bad weather, made worse by a wet harvest. Normally, he could sell them anyway to a local elevator — giant silos usually run by international grains merchants that store grain.

But this year they aren’t buying as much damaged grain. The elevators are already chock full.

“No one wants them,” Fontenot said. 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.

In Louisiana, up to 15 percent of the oilseed crop is being plowed under or is too damaged to market, according to data analysed by Louisiana State University staff. Crops are going to waste in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Grain piles, dusted by snow, sit on the ground in North and South Dakota. And in Illinois and Indiana, some farmers are struggling to protect silo bags stuffed with crops from animals.

U.S. farmers planted 89.1 million acres of soybeans this year, the second most ever, expecting China’s rising demand to give them better returns than other bulk crops.

But China slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans in retaliation for duties imposed by Washington on Chinese exports. That effectively shut down U.S. soybean exports to China, worth around US$12 billion last year. China typically takes around 60 percent of U.S. supplies.

The U.S. Government rolled out an aid program of around the same size — US$12 billion — to help farmers absorb the cost of the trade war. As of mid-November, US$837.8 million had been paid out.

Some of that money will pass from farmers to grain merchants such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Bunge Ltd., who are charging farmers more to store crops at elevators. (SD-Agencies)