When the Trump administration began its tariff campaign in 2025, some of the loudest critics focused on the consequences for Midwestern farmers or for border states. A year in, the impact of tariffs has become clearer, and some research suggests no state has emerged completely unscathed.
Early last year, the Trump administration established one of the most sweeping tariff regimes in the country’s history, including a 10% duty across the board and country and commodity-specific penalties, in some cases as high as 50%. These tariffs were widely expected to have a biting effect on the economy. But while some observers assumed the immediate pain would be confined to agricultural producers or states heavily reliant on international supply chains, the shock proved far more widespread.
Trump’s tariffs effectively revealed 50 different trade vulnerabilities across the country, each dictated by a state’s own production and consumption patterns, according to a paper published last week by researchers at Ohio State University and Cornell University. By the end of 2025, even states that had never depended on buying goods from abroad were feeling tariff tremors in their own way.
The peer-reviewed study, published by the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association, analyzed where and how goods are produced, shipped, and consumed in each U.S. state.
The authors found that tariffs led to “immediate shocks” for net importers who were suddenly tasked with absorbing the bulk of levy payments. But consequences for states that rely on exporting agricultural products internationally weren’t far behind, as U.S. trading partners swiftly moved to retaliate. Even states that neither import nor export huge quantities of goods ultimately had to pay the price of tariffs in the form of higher food prices, as farmers began passing costs down to consumers.
“The United States doesn’t have one agricultural trade exposure–it has 50 different ones,” Wendong Zhang, an economist at Cornell and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.
Some for everyone
The economic story of tariffs last year was one of a slowly cascading domino effect that gradually involved more and more parts of the U.S. economy. Early evidence suggested U.S. businesses and importers were shouldering most of the costs associated with tariffs. Larger retailers, in particular, were able to absorb most of those added costs, with only marginal consequences for customers, by front-loading orders before tariffs kicked in and drawing down inventories.
But the writing was always on the wall for consumers. Small businesses with fewer resources were among the first to be forced to raise prices, eventually joined by companies including Amazon, Walmart, and Target. By 2026, U.S. businesses and consumers were covering almost 90% of tariff costs, according to Federal Reserve research.
The knock-on effects have been primarily felt by agricultural and coastal states that rely on exports, the Cornell and Ohio State study found. Trading partners, including Canada and China, responded to Trump’s duties with retaliatory tariffs that have hit these U.S. states hard. In the first half of 2025, for example, agricultural exports to China fell to $5.5 billion from $12 billion in 2024, according to AgAmerica, an agricultural lender. This was primarily due to a dramatic collapse in Chinese soybean purchases from the U.S., which pushed tens of thousands of American soybean farmers into the middle of an escalating trade war.
The ripples from retaliatory tariffs aren’t contained to Midwestern staple crops. The study’s authors found that Canadian crackdowns on U.S. alcohol imports had consequences for Kentucky and Tennessee, both states with large bourbon and whiskey industries that are heavily exported. The U.S.-Canada trade war has also dealt a blow to exporters in the Northeast, where states previously sold around two-thirds of their milled grain, non-cereal crops, and their live animals and fish to Canada.
Steering clear of international trade has done little to help Americans either. As farmers have faced higher costs for livestock feed, fertilizer, and machinery, those higher costs now appear on grocery store shelves across the country as food inflation, according to the study.
With prices for items like fertilizer expected to rise even higher due to the war in Iran, and Trump promising to preserve his tariff policy despite orders from the Supreme Court to abandon his most extreme duties, all American consumers are likely to feel the sting of more expensive food, regardless of where they live.
“When processors face higher input costs, they pass it along,” Zhang said. “Eventually, the consumer in a New York grocery store is paying more for something that traces back to a trade dispute in Washington–even if New York itself exports very little.”
The upshot of Trump’s trade regime, according to the study, is that U.S. trading partners could continue gravitating towards other providers, eroding established import and export patterns across the U.S. If the consequences of tariffs a year in are any indication, the authors warned, a trade policy designed to crack down on importers could end up undermining and altering the makeup of regional economies nationwide.
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