ZeroHedge: Farmers are facing their worst economic downturn in at least 50 years
The word is getting out. Farming is in an existential crisis. However, will the Trump administration merely throw money at the biggest farmers, and/or buy up a lot of commodity crops, without attending to the structural reforms that are the only things that will save family farming and affordable food of high quality?
In addition to requiring structural reforms of USG subsidies and incentives/disincentives that are legislated by Congress and managed by the USDA, without going after the monopolies that are concurrently strangling farmers, there will be no lasting solution to the farming crisis.
The USDA has a virtually unlimited pot of (taxpayer) money from which to draw, which is not allocated by Congress, and which supplied tens of billions to farmers during the first Trump administration when tariffs also harmed them. It comes from the Commodity Credit Corporation.
At the bottom of this article, I have included information from the Congressional Research Service on the CCC source of agricultural funding, which I think of as USDA’s slush fund.
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
The agriculture industry in the United States is deeply broken. Farmers are the foundation of it all, but they are being financially squeezed from every direction. They are being squeezed by the giant monopolies that control the seeds, fertilizer and machinery that they need. And they are also being squeezed by the giant monopolies that purchase most of what they produce. Meanwhile, demand from overseas has dried up thanks to the global trade war. U.S. farmers really are facing a “perfect storm”, and as a result most farms are losing money and bankruptcies are surging.
Most Americans have absolutely no idea how bad it has gotten.
According to the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, this is the worst economic downturn for farmers in at least 50 years…
“We’re in the middle of the worst economic downturn that I’ve seen in my 50 years,” John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said at a regional meeting in Beatrice, Nebraska, last week.
“Agriculture is our foundation here in Nebraska and many states in the Midwest,” Don Schuller, a corn and soybean farmer, told ABC News. “If agriculture is failing here everything is going to fail.”
I wish that I could tell you that he is exaggerating.
But I can’t.
A sobering article that was recently published by AGWEB that was just shared with me is warning that our farmers are facing a “generational collapse”…
Farmers are not crying wolf. The wolf is real and right outside the door in the form of generational collapse.
The inescapable crop math of sustained crippling commodity prices and high input costs has many growers screaming for immediate relief, potentially via aid payments in late 2025 or early 2026. However, bailouts are Band-Aids over bullet holes.
The giant monopolies that provide the things that our farmers need increase their profits by squeezing farmers, and the giant monopolies that purchase what our farmers produce increase their profits by squeezing farmers.
For a while, many farms could still at least break even, but now conditions have gotten so bad that many farmers are losing hundreds of dollars per acre…
Yes, says Bailey Buffalo, 40, owner of Buffalo Grain Systems in Jonesboro, and president of Farm Protection Alliance.
“Horror stories. The pain is unreal. Worst farming situation I’ve seen in my life,” Buffalo says. “Look at Extension [University of Arkansas] numbers — corn growers losing $240 per acre; soybeans losing $144 per acre; and rice losing $380 per acre. The cotton growers may be worst of all.”
This is what I mean when I say that the agriculture industry is broken.
So what is going to happen as vast numbers of our farmers simply go bankrupt?
According to the chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, banks are projecting “farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%”…
Graves, chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, understands severe hardship. He farmed through the anemic ag crisis of the 1980s. However, the current unrest is a “coming disaster” unlike anything he’s witnessed across a 50-year career: “I’ve never seen this kinda look in farmers’ eyes. It’s fear. And it’s based in undeniable facts.”
In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. “My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead,” Graves describes. “That’s 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.”
A handful of companies control the seed market, a handful of companies control the fertilizer market, and a handful of companies control the farm machinery market.
Those giant monopolies are raking in huge amounts of cash while our small farmers are being ruthlessly crushed.
And when it comes time to sell what they produce, our farmers are at the mercy of the giant food monopolies.
On top of everything else, export demand has evaporated as a result of the global trade war. Things are particularly bad for soybean farmers…
For American farmers who export their harvests directly to Asia, the evaporation of Chinese demand for soybeans — at a time when fertilizer and other inputs have become more expensive — could potentially be devastating, and lead to bankruptcies and foreclosures.
“It’s just a massive shock to our markets,” Cory Walters, a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska, told ABC News.
We have seen agriculture shocks before, but never anything quite like this.
The White House is acknowledging that our farmers are facing a major crisis, and there are plans to introduce an aid package…
“Soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, cotton farmers are facing very difficult times,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “We are currently in conversations here at the White House, across the government, on a farmer aid package.”
Will that fix anything?
Not really.
The structural issues will still exist, but perhaps if the aid checks are big enough they will help some farmers avoid bankruptcy for another year.
What we really need is to do something about the monopolies so that our farmers can have a chance to scrape out a living.
But that isn’t going to happen, because the monopolies have lots of lobbyists and they contribute vast amounts of money to political campaigns.
Of course it isn’t just the agriculture industry that is facing a crisis.
All over the country, we are witnessing signs of a major economic slowdown. For example, this year Hollywood “has seen tourism numbers fall off a cliff”…
Los Angeles’s iconic Hollywood district has seen tourism numbers fall off a cliff, sparking fears for the future of the beleaguered City of Angels.
Visit California revealed tourist numbers slumped by 10 percent this summer, compared to the same period of 2024.
And businesses on Hollywood boulevard said customer numbers had plunged by up to 50 percent, raising the prospect of the neighborhood that is a byword for movies and showbusiness entering into a terminal decline.
A dramatic economic shift is taking place right now.
I expect this to be clearly reflected in the economic numbers in the coming months.
But this is just the beginning. The pain that we are experiencing now will get a whole lot worse.
At the beginning of this article, I stated that the agriculture industry is deeply broken.
Nobody can deny that.
But the truth is that our entire society is deeply broken, and now a time of reckoning has arrived.
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Explaining the Commodity Credit Corporation. Excerpted from the Congressional Research Service:
It has a permanent indefinite borrowing authority of $30 billion from the U.S. Treasury. By law, it receives an annual appropriation equal to the amount of the previous year’s net realized loss (see inset figure). This replenishes its borrowing authority from the Treasury and allows it to cover authorized expenditures that will not be recovered. Variations in its annual appropriation each year do not indicate any action by Congress to change program support but rather reflect changes in farm program payments and other discretionary uses of CCC’s authority that fluctuate based on economic circumstances and weather conditions.
CCC Net Realized Loss, FY2006-FY2025 (est.)
Sources: Compiled by CRS from USDA, Farm Service Agency (FSA), Commodity Estimates Book,FY2008-FY2017 President’s Budgets (Output 3); USDA, FSA, Data Master, FY2008 through FY2017 President’s Budgets; and USDA, FY2016 through FY2025 Explanatory Notes-Commodity Credit Corporation, “Account 1: Net Realized Losses.” FY2024 and FY2025 estimates are from the FY2025 Explanatory Notes.
Notes: Total funding for CCC is constrained by the $30 billion borrowing limit that does not adjust for inflation. The totals presented are nominal budget authority in billions of dollars not adjusted for inflation. The net realized loss estimated for FY2020 and FY2021 is above the $30 billion borrowing limit due, in part, to a midyear appropriation in FY2020 that reimbursed a portion of the loss before the end of the fiscal year. Actual losses occur in the fiscal year prior to the year of appropriation.
The majority of CCC activities are authorized through omnibus farm bills—most recently the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (2018 farm bill, P.L. 115-334) and related extensions (P.L. 118-158, Division D; and P.L. 118-22, Division B, §102). Farm bill authorization directs programs to use CCC’s borrowing authority, thereby dispensing with the need for an annual appropriation for individual programs. The use of this mandatory spending authority has expanded over time.
The CCC Charter Act also grants the Secretary of Agriculture broad powers and discretion to use the CCC, sometimes referred to as Section 5 authority, to fund activities that support agriculture. The mandatory funding nature of CCC activities may make CCC an attractive funding mechanism but one that is subject to budget enforcement rules if used by Congress. USDA’s use of CCC is not subject to the same congressional budget procedures; therefore, certain USDA actions may increase federal spending without needing to be offset under congressional budget enforcement rules.
…CCC funding and activities authorized by USDA are at the discretion of the Secretary of Agriculture and may change or be suspended by the Secretary of Agriculture at any time (e.g., the current Administration may change or suspend actions taken by a previous Administration).
Connect the dots. The ag industry is being destroyed in favor of a few giant concerns. Kind of like the monopoly that the goog, microsoft, fraudbook, nvidia and apple have on the tech industry.
Most of the mainstream food supply will be controlled by anti-human interests...or those supporting depopulation. Food is being systematically poisoned and even organic is not as safe as it once was.
Does congress care? Hardly as they are in on the depopulation game.
The underlying problem is directly related to the Make America Healthy Again proposals; (and I am a British subject). The answer is already written above; corn and soybean farmer . . . which supply the fast food industry with what are the disastrous feed stock for fast food. Here in the UK one of the most successful but small farms sells totally grass fed beef and lamb via their own web site, where the business is owned by their local community. Look at the wider debate and you will find a great debate regarding how to farm without expensive seeds, or fertiliser, and selling to their local communities. Thus the problem is being attached to a fast food industry that does nothing about addressing the needs of a healthy population. Again, being deliberately held in place economically by government grants specifically designed to hold them in place within an uneconomic industry that is not delivering what the nation; indeed, any nation needs, good honest food.
The entire farming community needs to turn away from the fast food supply industry, and government grants holding them in place. To do that they have to embrace a return to now ancient farming concepts that kept their soil in good health, alongside delivering the highest quality food to their surrounding communities.
May I be so bold as to suggest that the Trump administration needs to step back from simply adding to the grants that support the existing way of farming, instead they need to introduce very specific grants to allow the farms to return to delivering regenerative agriculture that needs far less artificial input, and higher value product that satisfies the needs of MAHA.
Market towns to deliver good quality healthy farm product directly into local communities rather than some vast monopoly must be the starting point. To make America healthy again requires a complete change in direction for the government support systems; away from corn and soybean farming using high cost seeds and related costs.
Simply handing out money without the recognition of the now desperate need to change the entire direction of farming away from a totally failed system of food supply will be by far the worst road to follow. Farming has to completely change direction; with NOT a single moment to lose.