US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer testifies during a US Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies hearing on 2026 funding priorities, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, Dec. 9, 2025.
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U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday that the deadline for China to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans from American farmers was not the end of December as the White House has said, but the end of the “growing season.”
Greer’s comment at the hearing came on the heels of a report by NBC News showing that the pace of China’s purchases of soybeans in recent weeks was well short of reaching the agreed amount by the end of the calendar year.
China, which in October agreed to end its monthslong boycott of American soybeans amid a trade war, to date has bought only about 3 million metric tons, the trade representative told members of the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.
Greer said there was a “discrepancy” in what the White House has described as the deadline and the actual deadline for the purchases to be completed.
The most recent growing season for soybeans ended in November, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
CNBC has asked Greer’s office whether there is a hard or rough deadline for China to reach 12 million metric tons of purchases, as agreed to as part of a trade deal with President Donald Trump in October.
Greer’s disclosure came in response to a question by Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb.
“There remains anxiety about if and when China will fully follow through on those purchase commitments that were made,” Fischer said.
She noted that the White House fact sheet on the trade deal said China would purchase 12 million metric tons by the end of the calendar year — contradicting recent comments from Greer.
The fact sheet says, “China will purchase at least 12 million metric tons (MMT) of U.S. soybeans during the last two months of 2025 and also purchase at least 25 MMT of U.S. soybeans in each of 2026, 2027, and 2028.”
Greer told Fischer, “It is for this growing season, so, thank you for highlighting that.”
‘”We’ve heard from a couple farmers, they wanted to know about that discrepancy, and it is a discrepancy, it’s through the growing season,” he said.
Joe Glauber, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture chief economist during the Obama administration, told CNBC in an interview he doesn’t know what the administration means when it refers to the growing season.
“It’s not a term that USDA means by any chance,” Glauber said. “Does that mean at harvests or does that mean actually the end of the marketing year, which is the more common way?”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week said he expected China to reach the 12 million metric ton mark by “the end of the season.”
“So I think that’ll be Feb. 28,” Bessent said, during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit in New York.
“They are in a perfect cadence to complete that goal,” Bessent said, after Sorkin said data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as of Nov. 14 showed that China had only purchased 330,000 metric tons.
Bessent called the figure Sorkin cited “bad information.”
Glauber said the marketing year for soybeans is September, when the soybeans are harvested and ready to sell, through August of the next year. China would be more likely to hit buying targets from the U.S. by next August, since Brazil dominates the soybean market in the early months of the new year that coincides with its harvest season and cheap prices. The U.S. typically exports more to China later in the year, when its soybeans are cheaper.
But that’s a far longer time than the initial two-month window the White House pitched when it announced the China framework.
“That’s a long time,” Glauber said. “This is not any sort of immediate relief.”
CNBC has asked the USDA for comment on Greer’s remarks.
