This is a bitter harvest season for many American farmers.
There's nothing wrong with their crops, which are bountiful. But even as grain elevators overflow with freshly picked corn and soybeans, farmers are losing money on every bushel. And there's not much relief in sight.
Economist Shawn Arita of North Dakota State University says the crop sector is being hit by a "triple whammy."
"You have high production costs. You have low crop prices. And then you also have the trade situation that exacerbates the condition," Arita says.
Brady Holst is one of the farmers being hit. He raises soybeans, corn and wheat in western Illinois. Holst typically sends part of his harvest down the Mississippi River and on to overseas markets like China. But thanks to the trade war, China isn't buying any U.S. soybeans this fall. That boycott is putting more downward pressure on already low crop prices.
"You used to just have to worry about weather," says Holst. "But seems like in the last 10 years, you basically have to worry about what's going on with politics here in the U.S. and then geopolitics in the world. Because you see so many things going on that affect how farmers are doing business."
It's not just the trade war
The cost of fertilizer has spiked, for example, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now, President Trump's tariffs are driving farmers' costs even higher.
Meanwhile, the prices that farmers receive for their crops have tumbled in the last three years. Arita says most farmers are now operating well below the break-even point.
In a way, farmers are victims of their own success. Unlike other countries where the government limits production to keep crop prices high, farmers in the U.S. have long been encouraged to grow as much as they can. When the harvest is good, the resulting glut of food and fiber can drive prices so low that farmers struggle to cover their expenses.
To be sure, there are exceptions. It's a boom time for cattle ranchers, for example. Having shrunk their herds in the face of drought three years ago, ranchers can now command a premium price for their remaining cattle. But most other parts of the farm belt are hurting.
The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation warned the White House last week that more than half of U.S. farms are losing money, threatening small towns and rural economies.
Court records show farm bankruptcies in the 12 months ending in June were up 56% from the previous year. And that ominous trend has continued.
"We had five new farm cases in two weeks," says Joseph Peiffer, an attorney who helps farmers file for bankruptcy in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. "That's astonishing. Shocking. And we're getting additional calls all the time."
Farmers are facing desperate times
Farming is a low-margin business in the best of times, Peiffer says. But with today's rock-bottom crop prices, growers are increasingly desperate.
"One of the farmers I talked to recently said he had his father take all the guns away from him, out of the house," Peiffer says. "He didn't want any guns around because he wasn't sure what he might do."
During Trump's first term in office, when China also boycotted U.S. farm products, the White House gave farmers $23 billion to cushion the blow. This year, the president has promised another farm bailout. But that would likely replace only a fraction of the income farmers have lost.
"Really the best thing farmers would like to see is just a place to sell our commodities at a price that we can make money at," Holst says.
Farmers are eternal optimists, he adds, always hoping next year will be better than this one. But as he hauls in the last of this season's corn and soybeans, Holst says it's not easy to maintain that faith.
"There's not a whole lot of signal of the trade war coming to an end," Holst says. "So it's looking like the entire next 12 months, there's not going to be a whole lot of good news."
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