Around here we commonly focus on the climatic effects on agriculture, but there's another type of storm brewing in the US: farmers are increasingly in debt and not making enough money to stay afloat.

What they are facing is a greater cost for fuel, seeds, fertilizer, farm equipment, and financing and are facing decreasing income, which for a number of reasons has led to lower commodity prices. This means that the breakeven price for a given crop/acre is increasing, but the overall dollar yield/acre is falling. While Congress did pass an economic relief act helping to offset some of these costs in December of 2024, but it isn't enough to help make up the shortfalls.

Then 2025 happened. Chaos in international trade, cuts to USAID, holds on USDA grants to farmers, and retaliatory tariffs have further increased inputs and left farmers scrambling to find buyers. The loss of buyers has led to a further drop in commodity prices. Now ICE raids have left the agricultural sector hurting for labor to help harvest and all the market uncertainty has left financing prices high, which means this next year will see increasing debt for US farmers and even less income to pay it off in a time when delinquency rates on farm loans are already increasing. But farmers are left with little choice if they want to keep the farm, they literally have to bet it against a future profit and hope the government gets its act together at the last minute to give them the assistance they need.

And it's increasingly looking like that won't happen. The reauthorization of the last farm bill got kicked down the road again at its previous spending levels, which due to inflation means that the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 provides relatively less assistance than it did when even more is needed.

So what happens next? More farms declare Chapter 12 bankruptcy. There's already been an increase from last year, just like 2024 was an increase from 2023. The first half of the year saw double the rate of bankruptcies. This rate is still historically low, but that doesn't mean it won't continue to be if the chaos continues and the body typically responsible for bringing stability, the US Government, is instead the cause of the chaos. If that happens, expect commodity prices for agricultural goods to rise again creating more inflation, which will adversely affect those already stressed by food prices, predominantly those of lower income who are already economically stressed.

Civilizational collapse is a slow process where the cumulation of small stresses leads to something breaking. The slow degradation of our ability to produce food and the rising costs procuring it has on the typical family mixed with with all the other social and economic stresses could lead to that.

Sources:
Examining the Economic Crisis in Farm Country