Adam Minter: The farm crisis demands certainty from congress now

Something is breaking in farm country, and the warning signs are growing harder to ignore.

The clearest indicator arrived this spring, when farm bankruptcies reached their highest level in six years. For many Americans, it was just another sad statistic. In rural communities, it was something far more ominous.

Risk and uncertainty have always been involved in farming. Weak prices, bad weather and rising costs come with the territory, and farmers can weather those setbacks. What makes this moment different is that several challenges, both old and new, are hitting at once, resulting in a squeeze that leaves few paths to recover when something goes wrong.

The current predicament has been years in the making. During COVID, commodity prices surged. But when the pandemic boom ended, so did the gains. Today, prices for major crops are down as much as 40% from their recent highs. At the same time, President Donald Trump's tariff battles - especially with China, Canada and Mexico - continue to upend key export markets, shrinking the number of buyers for American crops.

Some problems are newer. The war in Iran has driven up the price of fuel, fertilizer and other farm costs. Meanwhile, immigration enforcement has shrunk the population of undocumented immigrants, who are sometimes the only workers willing to fill agricultural jobs.

This cumulative burden is pushing some producers into insolvency.

One clear sign is the rising size and dollar volumes of operating loans, the credit that farmers use to pay for essentials such as seed, fertilizer and fuel. As production costs have risen, many farmers have had to borrow more heavily. Higher interest rates have made that debt increasingly expensive to repay.

In Minnesota, the nation's leading state for farm bankruptcies during the first quarter of 2026, there were nearly 700 requests for farmer-lender mediation in the first four months of the fiscal year; that's a big jump from the 524 total requests seen in 2025.

Those requests suggest the farm crisis runs deeper than bankruptcy numbers alone indicate, and the strain is not confined to farmers themselves.

Agriculture is the economic foundation on which community banks, equipment dealers, retailers and other businesses often depend. Farm distress sets off a domino effect, turning a farm problem into a Main Street problem.

In a recent survey of community banking presidents and CEOs, nearly half said that financial conditions had deteriorated compared with 2025. Farms and lenders aren't the only ones feeling the squeeze. In Minnesota, it's starting to show up in small-town business districts, as well.

Last year, Thom Petersen, the state's agriculture commissioner, noticed a troubling development: Several farm implement dealers were closing. "That was a real telltale sign that farmers weren't buying equipment," Petersen told me from his farm in Pine City. Instead, farmers are opting to repair what they have. "When you see that happening, it's a real concern."

The cutbacks don't stop there. Petersen says that farmers are "dialing back," even reducing the amount of fertilizer they use. This pain echoes from small businesses to the major corporations that supply them. Over the last two years, for example, major farm equipment manufacturers, including the iconic Deere & Co., have cut thousands of workers. Weak demand is among the cited reasons.

Older residents of farm country have seen this movie before. High interest rates and weak prices in the 1980s helped create the worst farm financial crisis since the Great Depression. Between 1980 and 1988, hundreds of thousands of farmers went through bankruptcy, foreclosure and restructuring.

Downstream, businesses suffered and closed, rural populations shrank, and civic institutions - like schools - contracted or shut down. The damage was generational, and many rural communities still haven't recovered.

Fortunately, today's crisis hasn't yet reached that scale. Land values remain strong, and farm support programs have kept many farmers afloat.

But those programs are not enough. Many resources, including those championed by the Trump administration, were designed to bridge difficult periods, not fix them. And as the current crisis drags on, farmers are forced to contemplate what happens if the support runs out. "I had a farmer tell me today that his bridge payment was in his account for 15 minutes," recalled Petersen, when asked how he's seeing the crisis play out.

Recent surveys of American farmers across the U.S. show pessimism about the future and economic anxiety about the present. Meanwhile, many of the tools used to arrest past crises - new trade agreements that expand markets, for example - are politically unrealistic in today's Washington.

But Congress still has the power to provide farm country with something it really needs: certainty. To do so, lawmakers should finally pass the long-delayed Farm Bill (the last version expired in 2023), the massive, once-every-five-years legislation that authorizes federal farm programs. Doing so would give farmers and rural communities an idea of what kind of support they can count on in the years ahead.

Without it, farmers are left to navigate one of the toughest periods in years, unsure of what support, if any, they can count on. For an industry built on long-term planning, that uncertainty is a burden of its own.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

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This story was originally published June 21, 2026 at 4:04 AM.