By Joshua Humphreys
American agriculture is facing the most challenging environment since the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Input costs to plant most row crops continue to exceed the income associated with their harvest. Nationally, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates that agricultural losses are approaching $100 billion during the 2025-2026 farming cycle. Even with the Trump Administration’s emergency “bailout” to commodity farmers, all of the largest crop categories, including rice, cotton, oats, peanuts, corn, wheat, and soybeans, still generated per-acre losses last year, ranging from -$61 to -$210 per acre.
Although they won’t call it “climate change,” even the Farm Bureau admits that “[i]n recent months, farmers have been hit with extreme winter storms, drought, wildfires and infrastructure losses, followed by spiking fuel and fertilizer costs driven by global conflict and supply disruptions.” Here in North Carolina where I farm, we have had nine named tropical storms and hurricanes over the last decade alone, costing more than $150 billion in damages. The number of billion-dollar weather-related disasters have increased over the last half century – roughly my lifetime – from a rate of only one event per year in N.C. to more than seven per year over the last half decade. Managing the realities of climate risk is a daily job for anyone involved in agriculture.
The Trump Administration’s penchant for wars – whether they be trade wars or seemingly endless military conflicts – has exacerbated the rising costs of equipment, fuel, and fertilizer. The Chief Economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization recently warned that the disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz associated with the war in Iran are triggering one of the most severe shocks in global commodity flows in recent years, with massive impacts on agricultural production and food security. And given the high reliance on foreign farm workers in the U.S., immigration enforcement raids on farms have disrupted farm operations, increased labor costs, and created a climate of fear in rural communities.
Today’s farm crisis is only magnifying a longer-term crisis of land stewardship, however. According to American Farmland Trust, we are on track to lose more than 18 million acres of farmland over the next decade and half. Approximately 11 million acres of farmland was lost during the first decade and a half of the 21st century, often due to sprawling, poorly planned low-density residential development. Indeed, N.C. is second only to Texas in farmland acres projected to be lost by 2040 – a figure that may exceed one million acres of nationally significant farmland in a “runaway sprawl” scenario that appears to be playing out in real time, exacerbated by the rush to build massive data centers in rural communities.
The crisis of stewardship is apparent in how we farm as well. Less than one percent of total US farmland is USDA Organic Certified, and less than five percent of land nationally is planted in rotational cover crops. Nearly a century after the Soil Conservation Service was established during the Dust Bowl era, U.S. farmland continues to suffer from severe soil erosion, to the tune of 4.73 tons per acre annually. This translates into a total soil loss of nearly 2 billion tons nationally per year, representing more than $12 billion in additional annual economic losses to farmers. Soil loss is particularly acute in the upper Mississippi River basin, where soil erosion rates are more than twice the national average, so it’s little wonder why our watersheds have become highly impaired by run off from agricultural land, given the routine use of soil-disturbing tillage practices and application of synthetic chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. Flooding from extreme precipitation events often drives that erosion, so climate change is merely adding insult to our self-inflicted injuries. The excess nutrients running off Midwestern corn and soybean farms have created a notorious “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi River – equivalent to approximately three million acres of habitat – where oxygen levels are so low that marine life simply cannot thrive.
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