On the cusp of fall, Zac Soltvedt was optimistic about the crop, as he looked over a plot of corn on his family farm in Seymour, Wisconsin.
“It's still nice and green yet — we haven't seen any fungus come in through here at all on this plot,” he said. “We're expecting a pretty good yield out of it.”
He says 2025 has been an “overall favorable weather year.” And he isn’t the only farmer expecting a good harvest.
Corn production nationally is expected to be 13% higher than last year, with Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa and six other states expected to see record yields, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s September forecast. While soybean production nationally will be down slightly from last year, several states – including Wisconsin – could still see record high yields.
Yet while weather and management have set farmers up for strong production, other factors are working against them. High input costs, low crop prices and strained international markets could combine to make it a tough year for crop farmers across the Midwest and Great Plains, experts say.
“A lot of what the farmers could control, they did and did well, which is leading to really strong production,” said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. “But almost everything that's outside of their control has moved against them this year.”
Strong yields across the country tend to drive crop prices down, Hart said. And corn prices are already lower than they were just a few years ago. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, farmers enjoyed high prices with corn peaking in 2022 at around $7 per bushel. Since then they’ve fallen to around $4 per bushel, according to the USDA.
Even as President Trump promises a bailout will be coming to farmers soon, growers face an uncertain future.
A survey of 1,034 farmers released in September by the National Corn Growers Association showed that nearly half believe the U.S. economy is on the brink of a farm crisis, and two-thirds were more concerned about their farm’s finances than a year ago.
“I think it's fair to say it's going to be a rough year,” Hart said. “More than likely, farmer incomes are going to be down. Not only are they seeing lower prices right now, but those higher input costs that are remaining stubbornly high.”
Trade tensions
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on a wide range of imports. Traditionally, other countries respond by slapping their own tariffs on U.S. goods, Hart said.
In general, those trade barriers are a bigger concern for soybeans than for corn, because soybeans are “much more dependent” on international sales, he said.
“When you think about soybeans, we tend to export 40 to 50% of everything we produce,” Hart said. “In the case of corn, we only tend to export 12 to 15% of what we produce.”
China, which purchased about half of all U.S. soybean exports last year, stopped buying U.S. soybeans in May in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs.
Matt Rehberg is a first generation farmer who operates a farm near the Wisconsin-Illinois border and is the vice president of the Wisconsin Soybean Association. He said China is the world’s biggest buyer of soybeans and is looking to other countries this year.
“That means we have to work harder and the logistical system for hauling beans around the world has to work harder to backfill beans into different spots,” Rehberg said. “All that boils down to just an extra cost that gets passed down to the market and ultimately the farmer.”
While trade tensions could potentially restrict corn exports, the effects of tariffs go beyond exports, said Brenda Gudex, executive director of the Wisconsin Corn Promotion Board.
“They're affecting us as corn growers on the inputted cost that we have,” she said. “Our fertilizers are being imported, so we have a huge uncertainty there.”
Rising costs
Like households nationwide, farmers have been hit hard by inflation. Since 2020, labor costs are up 47%, fertilizer 37%, fuel and oil 32%, and seed 18%, according to the USDA.
John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, said input prices continue to climb and often outpace the rate of inflation, leaving farmers feeling “squeezed” and “gouged.”
“You're just seeing this constant increase in not only input costs, but also machinery costs,” Hansen said. “Machinery costs have just far outpaced inflation.”
He said a new combine can cost anywhere from $800,000 to $1 million.
“That's just crazy,” Hansen said. “When you’ve got below the cost of production commodity prices, and you're losing money on every bushel you produce, how many bushels do you need to produce at a loss to be able to pay for a million dollar combine?”
Those high equipment prices mean some farmers are delaying purchasing new equipment.
Because “equipment prices have gone absolutely through the roof,” Soltvedt said he typically looks to avoid buying brand new equipment when he needs to upgrade.
“It's never new, it's just newer,” he said. “We like to be able to fix everything ourselves in house here. That's also a big factor on why we kind of stay with relatively older equipment.”
Farm incomes decrease
During this year’s growing season, farm incomes decreased in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, northwestern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, according to an August report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which surveyed agricultural lenders.
Those declining incomes are being driven by high production costs and low prices for corn, wheat and soybeans, said Joe Mahon, regional outreach director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
“That's compressing margins and leading to weaker [farm] incomes across the U.S., but it's particularly noteworthy in our region,” Mahon said.
While the agriculture sector saw a boom from 2010 to 2014, farm incomes have been “relatively weak” for much of the last decade, with the exception of a brief surge around the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a September report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Low crop prices have been helping drive the weak farm incomes, and some agricultural lenders warn that the current situation could cause some farms to fail if conditions continue into next year, the report states.
“This is going to be like the third year in a row that our farmers are going to be selling corn at below cost — yields look great but prices do not,” said Gudex with the Wisconsin Corn Promotion Board. “Farmers are going to be asked to absorb those losses, and it's going to become impossible for some people to do that.”
Farm bankruptcies increased in the first two quarters of 2025, but remain very low overall, according to the report from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.
“Unless there's some dramatic change in the markets, you might expect to see bankruptcies maybe continue to increase over the near term,” Mahon said. “There's some reasons to think that we might see an increase, but we're not really seeing it yet.”
While this year could be tough for farmers across the country, Soltvedt said farmers “have a lot of grit” and determination to persevere.
“At the end of the day, the farm economy is always cyclical — that's what kind of keeps everybody optimistic,” Soltvedt said. “It'll always come around. It's just a matter of we're in a slump for right now. And most of the time, guys always find a way to keep going.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.