US Farmer Sentiment Hits 12 Month Low in August

Sep 05, 2025

By Ryan Hanrahan

United States farmer sentiment hit a 12 month low in August as producers expressed less optimism about the future and reported weak financial expectations for their farms in the coming year. It was the third month in a row that the barometer has declined.

“Sentiment differed widely among producers depending on whether their farm is primarily a crop operation or a livestock operation,” the Purdue/CME Group Ag Economy Barometer said. “Responses from crop producers this month were much less optimistic than those from livestock producers, which indicates the disparity in profitability between crop and livestock enterprises. Beef cattle operations in particular are experiencing record profitability as the smallest cattle inventory since 1951 has pushed cattle prices to record levels. This stands in sharp contrast to returns for crop production which have weakened in 2025.”

World Grain’s Arvin Donley reported that “farmers again reported weak financial expectations for their farms in the coming year. As in July, the Farm Financial Performance Index remained below 100. The reading of 91 barely changed from July’s index value.”

“Crop prices that stand below the cost of production for many farms help explain why more farmers expect weaker incomes for the coming year. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) August Crop Production and World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates forecasted a 2025-26 season average corn price of $3.90 per bushel and a soybean price of $10.10 per bushel,” Donley reported. “Both estimates fall well below estimated break-even levels for US farmers. Despite the weak income outlook, the Farm Capital Investment Index improved 8 points from July to 61. Livestock producers had a notably more optimistic outlook in August than crop producers, which helped push the index higher.”

Source : illinois.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids