It has been just four years since the American farmer was selling his or her products at record-high crop prices, but like a serial dieter whose weight swings in an ever-widening arc, the lows that have followed have plunged deeper than they have across four decades.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service’s December update to Commodity Costs and Returns, average total costs per acre are expected to increase for every one of the nine principal row crops in 2026. Costs for producing these crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, barley, oats, peanuts and sorghum, are forecast to be up 2.2 to 3.3 percent in operational costs, which include farmwide expenses such as equipment, land and management.

Cost to produce is also expected to be up on an operational basis, which are the direct expenses of producing a crop, such as seed, fertilizer, chemicals, fuel and labor. The expenses are expected to bump upward from $160 per acre for wheat to $774 per acre for rice, the latter being particularly bad news for Arkansas ag, being a national leader in rice production.

The report noted the drivers of the operational cost increase are led by interest expenses, up 71 percent since 2020; followed by labor, up 47 percent; fertilizer, up 37 percent; fuel and oil, up 32 percent; maintenance, up 27 percent; chemicals, up 25 percent; and seed and marketing costs, which are both up 18 percent.

The subject of President Donald Trump’s trade spats during the first year of his second term did not help matters as rising tariffs impacted farm exports to major trading partners, including China and Mexico. However, sentiment on the measures is not that cut and dried. Purdue University in Indiana found last year that 70 percent of U.S. farmers believe the president’s tariffs will strengthen U.S. agriculture by pressuring China to boost its imports.

Farmers are much quicker to blame the Biden administration for what they perceive as weak leadership and the lack of a comprehensive Farm Bill for aggravating the situation. A multiyear omnibus law Congress typically passes every five years, the Farm Bill includes such things as disaster support, loan and credit programs, and rural development and infrastructure. The Farm Bill has not been renewed since 2018; that measure expired in 2023 and has since been triaged along by extensions that have done nothing to bring the bill to current economic conditions.

It does not take a Harvard MBA to do the math: Rising input costs married to sluggish-at-best commodity prices and a moribund response from Washington is a recipe that is leavening as we speak — to the detriment of ag land. Last year, farm sector debt reached a record $561.8 billion in 2025, a year-over-year increase of 3.7 percent, the USDA states.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, meanwhile, reported Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings — specifically for farmers and family fishermen — reached 88 in the first quarter of 2025, nearly doubling the previous year’s figure.

Arkansas has a ringside seat to the gear-grinding in Washington when it comes to ag. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, Sen. John Boozman has been a key figure in pushing the needs of the farmer and agribusiness to the front of the line. Boozman’s persistence paid off with several key elements of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and various emergency relief, the latest of which was last December’s announcement of $12 billion in bridge funds headed to the heartland.

Boozman sat down with Arkansas Money & Politics to discuss the work done thus far and the lifting left to do to help America’s farmers and ranchers keep the nation strong and the world fed.

Arkansas Money & Politics: Some of the ag issues were covered in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and then in December, the president authorized some emergency funds. How much of that action covers what the Farm Bill would have?

Sen. John Boozman: Well, what we did was essentially about 85 percent of the Farm Bill in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The things that we were able to get done were the things that cost a lot of money, and those are really reinforcing the safety nets that the farmers depend on — the risk management tools that they use, crop insurance, a number of different things that they use so that they can cut their risk as they plant crops, not knowing what they’re going to be able to receive for that crop until it’s harvested.

Because of that, and investing in research, investing in advertising so that we could market the crops that they’re producing, we spent about $68 billion, which is by far a record Farm Bill amount. We can be very pleased with that.

There were some things, though, that we weren’t able to do because the One Big Beautiful Bill was a reconciliation package, and what that means is that there’s certain things, certain policy things, that you can’t get passed using that particular bill. That would include things like the loan limits that people have right now. Those were all done several years ago. Now, with inflation, all of that needs to be adjusted upward, making sure that we’ve got adequate funding for rural America.

We also want to make sure that quality-of-life issues are addressed, such as help for rural hospitals, broadband, just everyday life, that we can plus that up a little bit so that we’re not losing the population that we’re losing in rural America. Those are the things that we’re going to be concentrating on in doing the rest of the Farm Bill, that 15 or 20 percent that we were unable to do in the One Big Beautiful Bill under reconciliation. 

Along with that, we listened to our farmers, listened to their lenders, the bankers and how they were going to be in a very difficult position with what they needed to be able to plant this upcoming crop. At the end of this last year, we worked with the president, and we were able to come up with $12 billion — $11 billion for row crops, $1 billion for specialty crops — and that was a big help.

It turns out that things have not gotten any better; in fact, things probably have deteriorated a little bit, and we really feel like that we need additional funding. We’re working hard with the administration, with USDA and Congress, in order to come up with additional dollars, again, to get our farmers through this difficult time. The things that we’ve already done will kick in and help a bunch, but we’ve got to get our farmers through until that period of time so that they’ll be able to continue providing the safest, cheapest food supply of any place in the world.

AMP: Are there other things that previously may not have been part of the Farm Bill but, because we are looking at these extraordinary circumstances, that are being considered or might be considered — things like some sort of credit or rebates on new equipment or farm loan forgiveness or things along that line?

Boozman: Well, what we’ve done so far is essentially give the money to the farmers and let them decide what their most pressing needs are. That might be loan repayments. It might be some other aspect of the farm economy that is unique to their particular circumstance.

What we do know is that right now, when you consider everything — bank loans, loans to the USDA, equipment dealers, seed dealers, all of those kinds of things — we’re really looking at a situation where we’re more in debt as farmers than we were during the 1980s, when it was so difficult. The problem is that we just don’t have the markets that we used to have as countries like Brazil have become much more productive and they’re now in a position where they actually can grow two crops per season.

They also have worked with the Chinese to really make it such that their infrastructure is so much better. Now they can get the crop onto a paved road, to a nice port where they can ship it. Until recently, that hasn’t been the case. That’s not just Brazil. It’s India. It’s Vietnam. The list just goes on and on, so we’ve got to create more markets.

The other thing that we’ve got to do is work hard to value-add products that we have and not just sell those as regular commodities, giving farmers more and different areas of income. There’s a lot of things we can do now with mechanization, but it’s going to take a different way of thinking. That really is the challenge as we go forward.

AMP: Knowing that these countries were gaining in sophistication — you’ve mentioned specifically Brazil, India, Vietnam, there’s probably others — were the president’s tariffs ill timed? Did that give some of these countries some cover to take, for lack of a better word, market share away from the U.S. that we’re going to struggle to recoup?

Boozman: No, the president used those [tariffs] to create new markets, and we’re really seeing a lot of the new markets that he talked about coming to fruition, whereby the previous administration did not create any new markets. Unions don’t like trade, and as a result, they just didn’t create new markets for our producers.

Besides that, this has been going on for a long time in the sense that the Chinese have to import about 60 percent of their food, which is a huge amount. Instead of becoming a fair trading partner with the United States over the last several years, the Chinese have turned into an adversary in order to diversify where they’re buying their crops from. Instead of buying it mostly from us, they’ve looked to these other countries, and they’ve spent money supporting their infrastructure. That’s where they’re getting the food they’re counting on, from them rather than us.

But we have to remember that the December before President Trump became president, we came up, and we worked really hard together to come up with a $10 billion economic package for our farmers in distress and $21 billion of disaster relief, a massive amount of money, and that was before President Trump even took office. President Trump didn’t create the inflation that we’re experiencing now. That came in the early part of the Biden presidency, so this is something that there’s just lots of factors going into it.

AMP: For the average citizen, funding agriculture would seem like the closest thing to a slam dunk there is in modern politics. How frustrated are you with how long a Farm Bill has taken, and do you have confidence that the remainder of this is going to happen, particularly heading into midterms? Should the balance of power shift in Congress, is the Farm Bill going to get pushed to the back burner again as it has since 2018? What’s your outlook when you look forward?

Boozman: I’m really encouraged when you look at what we’ve done for farmers in the last year and a half. At the end of the Biden administration, farmers were coming off of a horrible year, and then the year before was really bad also. Since then, $10 billion in economic aid, $21 billion for disaster relief and coming back a year later and providing another $12 billion and then also doing about 85 percent of the Farm Bill to the tune of another $68 billion — these are massive amounts of money that haven’t ever been done before. Thankfully, Congress really has responded, working together to do whatever we’ve needed to do to support our farming economy.

Most of our states, [ag is] No. 1 in their economy. Just like when you get outside of any town in Arkansas, when you get outside of any town of any size throughout the country, it’s not 25 percent of the economy. It’s 85 or 90 percent, so I think people really do understand how important this is, how important it is to provide aid, and we’ve been able to do that. 

The question is how do we get our farmers into this new world order? Where we’ve got so much competition overseas, how do we make them more competitive? How do we give them the tools to be more competitive? You do that through research. You do it through mechanization and then, besides creating farm markets, creating more markets for farmers at home. We want to help them use more of this produce to value-add products but also just for us to consume it in our schools. All those kind of things I think we can do a much better job at.

Overall, it’s been a good story. We’ve got this 15 percent left to do. I’ve got a really good partner with Sen. Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota, and we’re working hard to come up with these last few things that we need to do. The good news is they’re not very expensive. They don’t cost a lot of money. I think that we have a good chance of just knocking out these few things that really would help farmers, make their lives a little bit easier, which is really what it’s all about, in a very bipartisan way. 

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