(The Center Square)–As Congress continues working on the long-overdue federal farm bill, American farmers entering planting season are facing a grim financial landscape.
Due to the U.S.-Iran conflict and the Trump administration’s tariffs, American farmers are getting slapped with higher operational costs, which not only raise the cost of consumer goods but also threaten small farmers’ already fragile financial solvency.
The U.S. lost more than 156,000 farms between 2017 and 2025, according to 2026 U.S. Census data. From 2024 to 2025 alone, farm bankruptcy filings jumped by 46%, the Farm Bureau reported.
“Uncertainty around the availability and price of fertilizers and energy is already influencing decisions on input use, crop management, and investment, with direct consequences for yields and future supply,” the National Farmers Union warned in April.
“Fertilizer costs have risen sharply since the beginning of the crisis, while crop prices have remained largely stable – a combination that is squeezing farm margins at historically poor levels, leaving farmers with limited capacity to absorb further shocks.”
Before hostilities in Iran began, President Donald Trump’s tariffs on agricultural inputs including farm machinery, agricultural chemicals, and fertilizer squeezed the country’s agricultural sector, though the Trump administration did attempt to offset some of the consequences by distributing $12 billion in one-time bridge payments to American farmers.
The ongoing military hostilities in Iran are inflicting even more damage due to trade disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, which have spiked the costs of fuel and fertilizer.
Diesel fuel prices have increased by roughly 45%, per data from Farm Bureau, while about 70% of farmers surveyed said they cannot afford the amount of fertilizer they need
According to news reports, the cost of doing business has risen 25% for some American farmers since the conflict began in February.
Unfortunately, recent forecasts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture do not offer much hope of relief.
Total farm debt is projected to break records in 2026, reaching roughly $625 billion, according to the department’s “U.S. farm sector financial indicators” report, while total production costs are projected to top $478 billion.
The actual numbers will likely be higher, as the USDA released its analysis before the Iran conflict began.
U.S. domestic policy over the past few decades has also contributed to the agricultural sector’s financial woes.
Due to the structure of federal subsidies for crop insurance, most insurance providers are incentivized to cater to large agribusinesses, rather than small and beginner farms.
A 208-page report commissioned by Farm Action in 2024 revealed that, between 2012 and 2019, the largest 10% of U.S. farms by crop sales received 56% of all crop insurance premium subsidies.
Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of U.S. farmers received less than 3% of all crop insurance premium subsidies during that same period.
“This concentration is not attributable to large farms simply insuring more acres,” the report notes. “Over the same period, the average amount of premium subsidies per acre received by farm operations in the top 2% by crop sales ($40.54) was almost double the benefit received by farms between the 50th and 80th percentile and over eight times the benefit received by farms in the bottom 50%.”
Congress has kept federal crop insurance policy mostly on autopilot since 2018, the last time it passed a federal farm bill.
Though supportive of some measures, advocacy groups for small and family-owned farms have criticized the upcoming farm bill, which recently passed the U.S. House, for not including adequate support or reforms.
“Instead of rebalancing the rules in favor of independent farmers and rural communities, this bill largely preserves a status quo that benefits the largest corporations,” Farm Action’s Research and Policy Director Sarah Carden said.
“[W]e will continue urging Congress to use this opportunity to restore competition to the food and agriculture system, rebuild local and regional supply chains, and support farmers in feeding their communities healthy food.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
