At the Mercer County fair last week, farmers loading cattle told a New York Times reporter that business conditions were getting scary. Fertilizer costs up. Machinery costs up. Nobody in that deeply conservative corner of western Ohio was eager to blame the president for it.

Then, on Friday, the president gave them one more thing to worry about.

On August 21, 2026, Trump announced he was waiving the out-of-quota tariff on imported ground beef — up to 300,000 metric tons of it, for 90 days, with a promised discount of 25% off market price. Cattle futures dropped on the news the same morning.

So here is where Ohio's farmers stand. The tariffs that raised the price of everything they buy are still in place. The one tariff that was keeping cheap foreign beef out of the grocery case is coming off for three months.

And Jon Husted, the senator who is supposed to be their voice in Washington, voted three separate times to keep the first set of tariffs exactly where they are.

Three votes, three weeks, three no's

This isn't a matter of interpretation. It's in the Senate's own roll call record, from three consecutive days in October 2025:

• October 28, 2025 — S.J.Res. 81, to end the emergency declaration behind the tariffs on Brazil. Passed 52–48. Husted voted no.
• October 29, 2025 — S.J.Res. 77, to end the emergency declaration behind the tariffs on Canada. Passed 50–46. Husted voted no.
• October 30, 2025 — S.J.Res. 88, to end the emergency declaration behind the global tariffs. Passed 51–47. Husted voted no.

All three passed the Senate anyway. Enough Republicans crossed over that Husted's vote was on the losing side every time — which means he wasn't stuck. He had a choice, and he made the same one three days running.

Look at that first one again. Brazil is one of the biggest beef suppliers on earth. In October, Husted voted to keep the tariff wall up against it. Ten months later his own president is knocking a hole in that wall on purpose — not to help farmers, but because ground beef at the register got too expensive to defend before an election.

What the tariffs actually did to Ohio

Ohio is not a small farm state. According to the USDA's 2025 state agriculture overview, Ohio has 73,600 farm operations, 1.23 million head of cattle as of January 1, 2026, and soybean and corn crops worth about $2.7 billion and $2.5 billion a year.

The soybeans are where the trade war landed hardest. Ohio's biggest soybean customer was China. After the tariffs, China stopped buying — not less, none — and started buying from Argentina instead. The Trump administration then sent Argentina $20 billion in support.

By harvest 2025, Shelby County farmer Chris Gibbs — a lifelong Republican and a former chairman of his county GOP — described Ohio's family farms as "in a hell of a mess". China had bought 54% of U.S. soybean exports the year before and none at all that year, while tariffs drove up the cost of fertilizer, steel and machinery at the same time.

That's the squeeze. Costs up on one side. Markets gone on the other. It is the same story we've written from Indiana, Michigan and southern Minnesota, and Ohio's version is no different.

What Husted said when Ohio farmers spoke up

Husted's public line through all of it has been that the people complaining are mistaken. He has said the critics "are wrong," that the tariffs "haven't affected the economy negatively," and that "the policies are working."

In October 2025, when the Statehouse News Bureau asked him about the tariffs and Ohio's farmers, his office said he was not available for an interview. He sent a written statement instead. Here is the whole thing:

"My record shows that I support Ohio's farmers and consumers. I voted for the working family tax cuts, which allows farmers and job creators to immediately expense investments in new factories, capital investments in machinery and equipment, and in research and development — all of which Democrats opposed."

Read it twice. He was asked about tariffs. He answered about a tax deduction. A write-off for buying new equipment does not help a farmer who can't sell his crop, and it does not lower the price of the fertilizer he already bought.

That's a pattern with Husted. He wouldn't show up when disabled Ohioans held a forum about his Medicaid vote either.

Now the tariff comes off — for the one product that competes with Ohio cattle

The beef waiver is the part that should sting most in Mercer County.

Cattle producers have spent years liquidating herds through drought and high input costs. U.S. cattle inventory is at its lowest level in about 75 years, and that tight supply is finally letting ranchers turn a profit. Trump's answer to high grocery prices is to bring in 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef — which one market analyst quoted by the industry trade publication Drovers put at roughly 44 days' worth of American ground beef consumption.

The cattle industry did not take it as help. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association said "flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd." The United States Cattlemen's Association was blunter: "You don't put America first by putting U.S. cattle producers last."

Note what that admits. The whole argument for tariffs was that they don't raise prices for Americans. The administration just waived one specifically to bring a price down. You cannot hold both of those ideas at once — and Husted has spent a year insisting on the first one.

None of this is a defense of the tariffs the president is now dropping. It's the pattern that matters: when tariffs raised farmers' costs, Ohio's senator voted to keep them. When a tariff was the thing standing between Ohio's cattle farmers and cheap imports, it came off in an afternoon, with no vote at all.

What the record shows

Jon Husted voted three times in three days to keep tariffs in place that had already driven Ohio's fertilizer, steel and machinery costs up and cost Ohio soybean farmers their largest customer entirely. He told Ohioans the critics "are wrong" and that "the policies are working," and when a public radio newsroom asked him about the damage, he declined an interview and answered with a tax deduction. Ten months later the president waived the tariff on imported ground beef — 300,000 metric tons of it — sending cattle prices down for the 1.23 million head of cattle Ohio farmers are raising right now.

Source

Reporting from Millersport, Dayton, Celina, North Ridgeville and Akron by Campbell Robertson and Jessica Contrera, "Angry Ohio Voters Could Turn Their State Purple Again," The New York Times, August 23, 2026. Photo: Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times.