A bipartisan group of agricultural leaders are warning Congress of a deepening crisis on America’s farms. The cost of fertilizer has more than doubled since 2020. Fuel costs surged following the war in Iran. And U.S. agricultural exports are at their lowest levels in years.
Farmers across the country are reaching a breaking point. Last year, farm bankruptcies rose by 46% — a trend that’s carried into this year too.
The Ohio Newsroom spoke with five farmers from across the state to get a glimpse into how they’re coping with climbing costs.
The corn and soybean grower
Cy Prettyman has been farming since he was a little kid.
“I started my own swine operation when I was about 14 years old,” he said.
Now, the Ohio Farm Bureau’s first vice president grows corn and soybeans and raises beef cattle with his family in north central Ohio.
“The ag economy as a whole over the last three years has really been struggling with higher input costs and lower commodity prices,” he said. “That's put a strain on a lot of our farmers. Margins are very thin, so we're all doing whatever we can to try to tighten our belts a little bit.”
He says he’s seen costs increase for everything from steel to seeds.
“One of the areas that tripped me up this spring was fuel prices,” he said. “We were paying over $4, maybe over $4.50 or so, for off-road diesel in the spring and when you fill up tractors that have three or four hundred gallon tanks on them — just do the math real quick on that: that's a very big expense.”
The bison lover
In southeast Ohio’s Perry County, Carie Starr has been raising bison with her husband for nearly two decades.
“I tell everybody it was love at first bite,” she said. “I had bison at Ted's Montana Grill and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that's the most delicious thing I've ever tasted.’”
Now, the pair have a herd of 40 bison. Caring for them has become increasingly costly.
“We’re paying more for our hay,” Starr said. “Probably $3 to $5 more per bale for 300 bales — that’s going to add up.”
And that’s on top of high fuel prices.
“Big surprise, not everybody in Ohio wants to process bison, so we have to drive two hours one way to get to our butcher,” she said. These days, she’s forking over $100 to fill up her truck. She’s been taking a couple animals at a time to the butcher to stretch the dollar.
Plus, there’s the price she pays for insurance.
“I have to pay for my own insurance. And that is outrageous,” she said. “The cost for our policy has doubled in two years.”
The longtime farmer
Ohio farmer Chris Gibbs left a dairy corporation in 1983 to start farming on his own.
“We had a 2-year-old daughter, $2,500 and a pickup truck,” he remembered.
Gibbs and his family now raise corn, soybeans, alfalfa hay and beef cattle on 560 acres in Shelby County.
He’s seen bad years before and says, at first, it’s something farmers expect to deal with. But three years into cash flow losses, that’s getting harder to do.
“It's cyclical,” he said. “Second year, you deal with it, but you're looking for an escape and something better. It's tough. Third year, now we're in trouble. And that's where we're at.”
With soaring costs of fertilizer and diesel fuel, he says farmers across the state are struggling to survive.
“If I was totally in the grain business and that's all the income I had, we'd be in real trouble,” he said. “We'd have to go to reserves. We'd go to savings. We would have to do refinancing. Worst case scenario, we may have to quit and let somebody else farm because there's a time when your banker is going to say, ‘Hey, no, we can't go on anymore because you don't have the capacity to repay in the future.’”
The food forest garden farmer
Annie Warmke is a different type of farmer: Instead of raising acres of corn and soybeans, she grows food in a forest garden.
“The idea of a food forest is that you're going to plant all the real estate that you have at your disposal,” she explained. “In a rural setting, you would have a walnut or a hickory or a beech — some kind of really big tree is the top of your real estate. And then you work your way down all the way below the ground.”
She cultivates elderberries, blueberries, herbs and potatoes. And she propagates native Appalachian plants to sell at a produce auction about 25 miles away.
“When I start to add all that up, I don't make money. I don’t make any money,” she said. “It costs me to take my produce to the auction.”
She says there’s still a benefit to showing up – people see her product and she gains connections. Plus, she values supporting other local growers.
“I'm just saying that I have a different situation, but it’s still impacting me,” she said.
The eternal optimist
Bennett Musselman’s family has been farming in central Ohio for generations. He says the cost to farm now is especially high.
“It's been a gut punch a little bit with the prices,” he said. “Every time you go to purchase something, it was more expensive this year than it was last year, all the way down to parts and oil and general maintenance things. It stacks up quite a bit.”
This year, his family picked up two farms from neighbors who were retiring. He said the timing wasn’t ideal with current high prices, but waiting wasn’t an option: These sorts of sales don’t happen often.
The added costs have stressed the operation.
“We had to buy some fertilizer late in the game,” Musselman said. “These new farms — profitability is going to be very, very tough. But if you don’t take advantage of the opportunity, you may not ever get that opportunity again.”
He’s hopeful the move will pay off down the line.
“The farmer is the eternal optimist. We bury stuff in the ground and hope that we make money on it,” he said. “We're not going to have a record crop by any means, but we just hope to make enough to do it again next year.”
