U.S. Farmers Are Facing The Worst Economic Downturn In At Least 50 Years
By Michael Snyder/Economic Collapse Blog September 30, 2025
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The agriculture industry in the United States is deeply broken. Farmers are the foundation of it all, but they are being financially squeezed from every direction. They are being squeezed by the giant monopolies that control the seeds, fertilizer and machinery that they need. And they are also being squeezed by the giant monopolies that purchase most of what they produce.
Meanwhile, demand from overseas has dried up thanks to the global trade war. U.S. farmers really are facing a "perfect storm", and as a result most farms are losing money and bankruptcies are surging.
Most Americans have absolutely no idea how bad it has gotten.
According to the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, this is the worst economic downturn for farmers in at least 50 years...
"We're in the middle of the worst economic downturn that I've seen in my 50 years," John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said at a regional meeting in Beatrice, Nebraska, last week.
"Agriculture is our foundation here in Nebraska and many states in the Midwest," Don Schuller, a corn and soybean farmer, told ABC News. "If agriculture is failing here everything is going to fail."
I wish that I could tell you that he is exaggerating.
But I can't.
A sobering article that was recently published by AGWEB that was just shared with me is warning that our farmers are facing a "generational collapse"...
Farmers are not crying wolf. The wolf is real and right outside the door in the form of generational collapse.
The inescapable crop math of sustained crippling commodity prices and high input costs has many growers screaming for immediate relief, potentially via aid payments in late 2025 or early 2026. However, bailouts are Band-Aids over bullet holes.
The giant monopolies that provide the things that our farmers need increase their profits by squeezing farmers, and the giant monopolies that purchase what our farmers produce increase their profits by squeezing farmers.
For a while, many farms could still at least break even, but now conditions have gotten so bad that many farmers are losing hundreds of dollars per acre...
Yes, says Bailey Buffalo, 40, owner of Buffalo Grain Systems in Jonesboro, and president of Farm Protection Alliance.
"Horror stories. The pain is unreal. Worst farming situation I've seen in my life," Buffalo says. "Look at Extension [University of Arkansas] numbers -- corn growers losing $240 per acre; soybeans losing $144 per acre; and rice losing $380 per acre. The cotton growers may be worst of all."
This is what I mean when I say that the agriculture industry is broken.
So what is going to happen as vast numbers of our farmers simply go bankrupt?
According to the chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, banks are projecting "farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%"...
Graves, chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, understands severe hardship. He farmed through the anemic ag crisis of the 1980s. However, the current unrest is a "coming disaster" unlike anything he's witnessed across a 50-year career: "I've never seen this kinda look in farmers' eyes. It's fear. And it's based in undeniable facts."
In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. "My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead," Graves describes. "That's 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it."
A handful of companies control the seed market, a handful of companies control the fertilizer market, and a handful of companies control the farm machinery market.
Those giant monopolies are raking in huge amounts of cash while our small farmers are being ruthlessly crushed.
And when it comes time to sell what they produce, our farmers are at the mercy of the giant food monopolies.
On top of everything else, export demand has evaporated as a result of the global trade war. Things are particularly bad for soybean farmers...
For American farmers who export their harvests directly to Asia, the evaporation of Chinese demand for soybeans -- at a time when fertilizer and other inputs have become more expensive -- could potentially be devastating, and lead to bankruptcies and foreclosures.
"It's just a massive shock to our markets," Cory Walters, a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska, told ABC News.
We have seen agriculture shocks before, but never anything quite like this.
The White House is acknowledging that our farmers are facing a major crisis, and there are plans to introduce an aid package...
"Soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, cotton farmers are facing very difficult times," Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. "We are currently in conversations here at the White House, across the government, on a farmer aid package."
Will that fix anything?
Not really.
The structural issues will still exist, but perhaps if the aid checks are big enough they will help some farmers avoid bankruptcy for another year.
What we really need is to do something about the monopolies so that our farmers can have a chance to scrape out a living.
But that isn't going to happen, because the monopolies have lots of lobbyists and they contribute vast amounts of money to political campaigns.
Of course it isn't just the agriculture industry that is facing a crisis.
All over the country, we are witnessing signs of a major economic slowdown. For example, this year Hollywood "has seen tourism numbers fall off a cliff"...
Los Angeles's iconic Hollywood district has seen tourism numbers fall off a cliff, sparking fears for the future of the beleaguered City of Angels.
Visit California revealed tourist numbers slumped by 10 percent this summer, compared to the same period of 2024.
And businesses on Hollywood boulevard said customer numbers had plunged by up to 50 percent, raising the prospect of the neighborhood that is a byword for movies and showbusiness entering into a terminal decline.
A dramatic economic shift is taking place right now.
I expect this to be clearly reflected in the economic numbers in the coming months.
But this is just the beginning. The pain that we are experiencing now will get a whole lot worse.
At the beginning of this article, I stated that the agriculture industry is deeply broken.
Nobody can deny that.
But the truth is that our entire society is deeply broken, and now a time of reckoning has arrived.
Originally published at The Economic Collapse Blog
