Farmers are struggling to turn a profit. How does it compare to the farm crisis in the '80s? 38%
By Hope Kirwan32%
7/20/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Appeal to Authority, and Anecdotal, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 21.4% saturation with 260 hits. Analysis detected 1,480 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,216 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 44.3% and a BS Rank of 38% (11,820 of 18,799 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.90% of the article peer group.
This story is the first in "Tough Times," a Harvest Public Media series looking at the economic stress that many American farmers are facing in 2026.
Rows of green corn blanket Pat Mullooly's farm in southern Wisconsin.
After months of preparing the ground, planting seeds and adding fertilizers and pesticides, much of his work for the season is already done.
"Now, the crop is a little bit in Mother Nature's hands," said Mullooly, who is the sixth generation of his family to operate the farm just north of the border with Illinois.
He's had strong yields for both his corn and soybeans the past two summers, which has helped offset low prices for the crops.
But Mullooly worries he won't have that to fall back on this year.
"Sitting here today, our crop doesn't appear to be as good as last year," he said.
"That's the risk we take."
He's hoping he can bring in enough money for his crop to cover what it cost to grow it.
Profit margins for U.S. corn and soybeans have been negative for the past two years, according to data from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.
This year's cost of production is projected to be even higher thanks to the war in Iran driving up the price of fertilizer and fuel.
The prolonged period of negative margins and economic stress felt by Midwest farms has drawn some comparisons to another downturn: the 1980s farm crisis.
More than 40 years ago, a decline in crop prices and farmland values, massive amounts of farm debt and high interest rates led to a landslide of farmers forced to leave the industry.
By the end of the decade, an estimated 300,000 farms went bankrupt or foreclosed.
At the time, Mullooly was a teenager, and his parents did their best to shield him from the economic stress.
It wasn't until much later that he realized how much his parents struggled to manage their debt and keep farming.
"[I've heard] the horror stories of them not even getting the interest paid, and putting that back on the debt," he said.
"So it was very tough times back then."
Federal safety net makes a difference
While the economic stress might seem comparable, the similarities between the current downturn and the ‘80s crisis are limited, according to Seth Meyer, agriculture economist and head of the University of Missouri's Food and Agricultural Policy Institute.
He said crop insurance is now commonplace for farmers, which wasn't the case 40 years ago.
Growers also have access to federal safety net programs, like Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, that are meant to kick in when crop prices fall.
These supports are designed to keep producers from suddenly losing their farm through a foreclosure, what Meyer refers to as a "disorderly exit" that characterized the ‘80s farm crisis.
"It won't keep people from exiting," said Meyer.
"It's an attempt to make a more orderly result.
So folks aren't knocked out by one bad situation, some of which is out of their control."
Meyer, who previously worked as chief economist at USDA, said another difference between now and four decades ago is the willingness of the federal government to inject cash into the farm economy through one-time payments and disaster relief.
At the end of 2024, Congress allocated $10 billion for direct payments to farmers to help "mitigate the impacts of increased input costs and falling commodity prices."
The Trump administration announced in December that USDA would make another $12 billion in direct payments because of the economic stress.
President Donald Trump has already asked Congress for another $10 billion for direct payments to farmers to make up for the 2026 crop, along with $1.1 billion for Florida growers impacted by a devastating freeze in February.
Meyer said these emergency payments can help a farmer pay down their debt and survive until crop prices recover.
But he said the support can also have the unintended effect of keeping costs for supplies like fertilizer high.
"The government provides assistance to try to stabilize the sector," he said.
"At the same time, that gets passed on by producers continuing to purchase inputs, and it makes that adjustment slower over time."
Farms started downturn with less debt
On top of higher costs for supplies, farmers are also having to think about the impact of interest rates on their debt.
After remaining around 3% during the COVID-19 pandemic, the base rate used by banks increased to 8.5% in 2023 and 2024.
This year it’s remained just under 7%.
But Joe Springer, managing director of agriculture lending for Compeer Financial, said interest rates are still well below the roughly 20% charged by banks at the start of the ‘80s.
He said farms are also carrying a lot less debt thanks to the last period of high crop prices from 2020 to 2022.
"We're coming off of record years, where our row crop producers made more money than maybe they ever had in their careers," said Springer, who works with farmers in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
After three years of low crop prices, he said those profits are now starting to run out, leaving farms with little to no cash.
Springer feels like the current downturn is different from the typical price cycle because of how quickly farms went from record profits to struggling to get by.
And he worries the increased volatility in both crop prices and the cost of inputs could be here to stay.
He points to the unexpected war in Iran and the rapid spike in fertilizer and fuel prices as an example.
"It's more challenging to manage in this type of an environment because of that volatility," Springer said.
The future of farm profitability also depends on how long crop prices stay depressed.
Meyer said the global supply of corn and soybeans is strong enough that recent economic shocks like the Strait of Hormuz closure did little to move the needle on prices.
"It's going to take a bigger shock in order to eat into those reserves and start to get a price run," he said.
While the success of his 2026 crop is still uncertain, Mullooly is already doing what he can to manage his expenses for next year's growing season.
He will lock in prices for next spring's supplies in the coming weeks with the hope of guarding against future increases.
It's a strategy that saved him from paying a much higher price for fertilizer this spring after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran.
But Mullooly said he knows at least one neighbor who hadn't bought ahead in the hope that prices would come down.
"Everything we do is managing risk, and there's a cost to that," he said.
Mullooly said farmers are optimists by nature.
He's hopeful that input costs will start to drop if the U.S. can end the war with Iran, easing the economic strain on farms long enough to make it to the next upswing in commodity prices.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains.
It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
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