Farmers growing increasingly desperate amid rising energy and fertilizer prices [View all]

Source: msn/Axios

9h


Farmers across the Midwest are entering planting season under mounting financial pressure, as the Iran conflict drives up diesel and fertilizer prices — deepening an agricultural downturn that some say is the worst since the crisis of the 1980s.

Why it matters: Rising fuel and fertilizer costs threaten to push more family farms out of business, drive up food prices and further strain rural economies already battered by trade disruptions, inflation and extreme weather.

The big picture: Mark Mueller — a northeast Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association — tells Axios that the current landscape is more challenging than at any time since the 1980s farm crisis, when interest rates soared and exports plunged, triggering agricultural bank failures.

The stresses are showing, with rising bankruptcies and lenders becoming more reluctant to provide farmers with operational loans.

"There's going to be fewer farmers next year than there is this year," Mueller says.