Under a blanket of snow in western Wisconsin, Craig Myhre's grain bins are full this winter. He even rented extra storage space at a nearby farm.
"It looked like the thing to do was going to be to sit on your bushels," said Myhre, who has been farming corn and soybeans for nearly 40 years.
Crop prices, especially for soybeans, were below his cost of production throughout the summer, Myhre said, which kept him from preselling some of his crops through forward contracting.
By the time harvest rolled around, his best shot at a profit was waiting to sell in the spring. That means he doesn't have the typical influx of cash to pay off his bills from the year and buy fertilizer and seed for next spring.
"Normally, I've sold all my beans in the fall, quite a bit of the corn," Myhre said. "This is new territory for me. And so that's why I'm trying to figure out how to juggle all this."
It's not how he usually handles a plentiful crop like the one he harvested this fall. But 2025 was an unusual year for most farmers. Across the central U.S., producers faced tight margins, ever-changing global trade conditions and a shake up of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many of its programs.
High costs, tariffs challenge farm profits
From the start of the year, Myhre knew his margins were going to be tight. Soybean prices have been down since the end of 2023. At the same time, the cost of supplies have continued to rise. An analysis by the American Soybean Association found annual production expenses over the last four years have been among the highest in U.S. history.
"You're trying to figure out where you can trim costs, but it's just tough," Myhre said. "Parts, repair bills, fuel. It's hard to get away from the bills, because it's stuff you've got to have."
Balancing the books became even more challenging for producers this year when President Donald Trump fulfilled his campaign promise of bringing back tariffs on China and other major trading partners.
The Trump administration constantly changed who was paying higher tariffs and on what products. Paul Mitchell, agricultural and applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that caused major swings in commodity prices and had a real impact on producers' ability to plan ahead.
"All that farmers heard was uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty, in the midst of this troubled economic outlook," Mitchell said.
In times of down prices, farmers are used to turning to USDA programs like Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage, which provides payments to farms if revenue or crop prices dip below a certain level.
But Mitchell said those payment rates were still at levels set in 2018 when Congress passed the last farm bill, reducing the amount of cushion offered for the 2025 crop year. The actual payments were also delayed by several weeks during the federal government shutdown this fall, adding more uncertainty for farmers who are used to receiving their checks in mid-October.
Mitchell said farms received the most help from one-time subsidies and disaster relief created by Congress for previous crop years. But navigating the different programs and sign-up dates was a challenge of its own.
"Nothing's worked the way it's supposed to," he said. "Ad hoc programs [are worth] billions of dollars, but nothing you can plan on."
Canceled USDA programs
It wasn’t just tariffs that were constantly changing in 2025. The Trump administration canceled or froze billions of dollars in grants and food assistance programs under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Many of the programs were created under former President Joe Biden's administration in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. They focused on building resiliency in local food supply chains and addressing the impact of climate change on farms.
Travis Jones grows gourmet mushrooms in southwestern Missouri and creates specialty products for people with food allergies or dietary restrictions. He primarily relies on farmers markets or word of mouth for his sales. But Jones was hoping to expand his online marketing efforts using a Business Builder grant from one of the USDA's Regional Food Business Centers.
The $360 million program was created in 2023 to support farms and food businesses selling to local and regional markets, including with technical assistance and coordination among local producers.
Jones said small or specialty farms like his are often focused on buying equipment or supplies, and they don't have any funding left for marketing their product.
"Marketing would be something after a while," he said. "But with [the Business Builder] program, the marketing was easier to get to, not only not because of the money, but the people who actually helped you."
But before Jones could apply for the program's second round of grants, the USDA abruptly canceled the program in July. Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a press release that the program should not have been established using pandemic-related funding and that the funding would be "repurposed to better support American agriculture.”
The loss was disappointing for Jones, who saw how the initial round of funding was a "stepping stone" for many small businesses to push out their business to a wider customer base.
"I'll just give up on that now," he said. "I don't know how or have the time to manage the marketing part of it."
In eastern Nebraska, beef producer Jordan Classen said she was most disappointed to see the Trump administration terminate two programs helping schools and food banks buy food from local farmers.
The Local Food for Schools program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance program would have provided just over $1 billion this fiscal year. But Trump's USDA canceled the funding in March, saying the programs "no longer effectuate the goals of the agency."
Classen said being able to sell to a school district or hospital is a much-needed source of stability for young and beginning producers like her and her husband, who are both first-generation farmers.
"Those are typically reoccurring orders that are going to be pretty stable," she said. "They're not as volatile as going to a farmers market, and if it rains that day, you only have like 10 people."
Staff losses, government shutdown
USDA also lost thousands of staff in 2025 through the Trump administration's efforts to downsize the federal workforce. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition estimates the agency lost 18,000 positions through layoffs and resignations, including from state and county offices.
The agency's dysfunction was made worse by the federal government shutdown in October. Most USDA programs did not operate for the first three weeks of the shutdown, halting access to everything from loans to harvest progress reports.
For producers like Classen, the turmoil means local USDA staff are less accessible to help with projects on the farm or business-related questions, what's often referred to as technical assistance.
"The people that you're used to talking to are covering two, three, four people's jobs," Classen said. "So their availability of time to even have any of these discussions is drastically reduced."
Reduced staff could also make it harder for the agency to organize the $12 billion bailout the Trump administration announced this month. The subsidies, called the Farmer Bridge Assistance program, were expected earlier this fall, but the rollout was delayed by the government shutdown.
USDA plans to release the payments by the end of February. But details of how the payments will be calculated have not yet been released.
In Wisconsin, Myhre said it's not something he can rely on, especially as he works with his lender to pay off his 2025 expenses and negotiate an operating loan for next year. He doesn't see conditions getting any easier for farmers next year.
"That's constantly in the back of my mind: how far do you go?" Myhre said. "If you're borrowing money to survive, you can only do that so long."
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.
