One of my former editors once pointed out that farmers and editors approach a growing season similarly.
Farmers annually face myriad choices and devote much time to planting, spraying, calving, harvesting and other farm tasks. Editors also face numerous choices and aim to build stories during the same time. As the year winds down, both parties harvest what they have carefully nurtured.
This year, though, harvests for both parties are more difficult compared with the dawn of this decade. Reasons include:
The summer crops rally that wasn’t. Unless there’s a sudden surge, minimal price rallies occurred. For the most part, it was a picture-perfect growing season, with timely planting and plenty of rainfall (sometimes too much) occurring. Meanwhile, input prices remain sticky amid sour corn and soybean prices.
Resulting tight margins. In September, USDA’s Economic Research Service released a farm sector income forecast report. Overall, the report forecast an increase in total inflation-adjusted cash receipts for all commodities from $524.3 billion in 2024 to $535.2 billion in 2025.
Digging deeper, though, the report shows lower crop receipts for Iowa’s two major crops, corn and soybeans. Corn receipts for 2024 of $63.4 billion are expected to fall to $61 billion in 2025. For soybeans, 2024 receipts of $46.8 billion are expected to fall to $43.5 billion in 2025.
Meanwhile, production prices remain sticky. The report forecasts total production expenses, including those associated with operator dwellings, to increase $12.0 billion (2.6%) from 2024 to $467.4 billion in 2025. Although fertilizer, seed, fuel and pesticides show a nominal decrease to no change, they so far aren’t decreasing in step with commodity prices.
A plethora of pestilence. Southern rust nabs the “disease of the year” award. This is the second year this fungal disease blew into Iowa from the southern U.S. Prolific precipitation helped fuel pathogens that, left unchecked, can clip corn yields from 10% to 30%. Meanwhile, waterhemp continues to be Iowa’s weed scourge. This pugnacious pigweed has thus far resisted six herbicide sites of action that have been confirmed in the state.
“During the Roundup Ready days, Roundup was the easy button,” says Wes Everman, an Iowa State University Extension weed specialist. “It made poor farmers good, good farmers look great and great farmers got big.”
No more.
“In the last five years, we've had to add in more management time and effort around our herbicide selection and use,” Everman says. “Going forward, we’ll have to add even more time to manage weeds and our herbicides.”
What to do
If you’re feeling financial stress, communicate with your lender and other risk-management partners.
“The first thing we're advising farmers to do is to be proactive,” says Jase Wagner, president and CEO of Compeer Financial. Forming a plan now with the help of lenders and risk-management partners can help farmers forge through this tough economic time.
Good news exists. Livestock markets continue to be strong. Cash receipts from cattle and calves are expected to increase from $112.1 billion in 2024 to $129.7 billion in 2025, according to September’s USDA report. Hog receipts also are forecast to rise from $27.3 billion to $29.9 billion during the same time frame.
On the crop side, farmers will start with a clean southern rust slate in 2026, as the pathogen doesn’t survive Iowa winters.
Southern rust solutions also exist. Some hybrids tolerate southern rust better than others. Meanwhile, preliminary results in 2025 ISU tests suggest the best fungicide treatment to reduce disease has been a double shot of Quilt Xcel, or a generic mix of its active ingredients, azoxystrobin and propiconazole.
However, a limited database exists to find which hybrids have southern rust tolerance. The azoxystrobin and propiconazole fungicide treatment also only concerns southern rust.
“It won’t necessarily be effective against tar spot or northern corn leaf blight or other diseases,” says Alison Robertson, ISU Extension plant pathologist.
The prolific spread of herbicide-resistant waterhemp and other herbicide-resistant weeds won’t cease. Still, it may spur the revamping of weed-management strategies, Everman says. It may even morph back to models used in the pre-Roundup Ready days, when many fields had fencerows that divided them into smaller ones.
“We could see which weed patch always had cocklebur, and another patch had ragweed, and maybe a high spot was really grassy or had lambsquarters,” Everman says. Rather than applying the same herbicide mix across all acres, farmers may shift to more targeting of products to individual fields.
Tough times, tough people
I often think about the late Rev. Robert Schuller during times like these. The famed minister and Alton native often recounted what he said to a group of farmers in the throes of the 1980s farm crisis.
His message was this: “Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.”
That rings as true today as it did over 40 years ago. We’ll do our best to help you navigate these difficult times.