Understanding The Current Farm Crises and the Opportunity Within
The numbers tell a story farmers across the Midwest already know: corn and soybean prices are in the dirt. According to the USDA's latest farm income forecast, corn receipts are expected to fall by 3.7 percent in 2025, while soybean receipts are forecast to drop by 7.2 percent. With corn prices hovering around $3.90 to $4.10 per bushel and soybeans at $10.00 to $10.80, many row crop operations are staring down margins that are razor-thin or worse.
It's enough to make anyone nervous. But here's the thing about farm crises—they're not new.
History Has a Habit of Repeating Itself
In a recent episode of the Prairie Farm Podcast, the hosts touched on something worth remembering: farm crises seem to roll around every 50 years or so. There was the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the devastating farm crisis of the 1980s, and now we're seeing commodity prices and farm incomes that have some economists drawing uncomfortable parallels.
The 1980s farm crisis hit the Midwest like a freight train. High interest rates, a grain embargo against the Soviet Union, and crashing land values created a perfect storm. In Iowa alone, farmland lost 60 percent of its value between 1981 and 1986. By the end of the decade, approximately 300,000 farmers had defaulted on loans, and more than 250,000 farms went out of business. The suicide rate among farming populations was four times higher than normal.
Go back another 50 years to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and you find an even more devastating chapter. A combination of severe drought and poor farming practices turned the Great Plains into a wasteland. Between 1930 and 1940, roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states—Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Roughly 750,000 family farms disappeared through foreclosure or bankruptcy between 1930 and 1935 alone.
The people who lived through those eras didn't have the luxury of hindsight. They just had to wake up every morning and figure out how to survive.
And survive they did.
Where We Stand Today
The 2024-2025 farm economy looks challenging for row crop producers. After the highs of 2022—when corn averaged $6.54 per bushel and soybeans hit $14.20—prices have fallen back to what some economists are calling the "new (old) normal." The hope that we'd entered a new era of higher commodity prices has been, as one University of Illinois study put it, "dashed."
According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, net farm income has fallen 23 percent from the highs reached in 2022. For wheat family farms, net cash farm income is projected to decline by 48 percent in 2024. Soybean farms are looking at a 38 percent decline, and corn operations face a 36 percent drop.
The echoes of the 1980s are real. But there are also critical differences. Interest rates, while elevated, aren't at the 20 percent levels that devastated farmers in the '80s. Land values haven't collapsed. Many farmers entered 2024 with strong balance sheets after several profitable years.
The question isn't whether this is hard—it clearly is. The question is what comes next.
Change Creates Opportunity
Here's something worth chewing on: every major farm crisis in American history created opportunities for the next generation. The Dust Bowl led to the Soil Conservation Service and fundamentally changed how Americans thought about land stewardship. The 1980s crisis reshaped farm policy and ultimately led to more efficient, science-based farming practices.
When the snow globe gets shaken—and it's definitely getting shaken right now—things that were stuck come loose. Land changes hands. Business models get tested. People who've been thinking about getting into farming suddenly have a window.
The Prairie Farm Podcast touched on this idea: change and opportunity aren't the same thing, but they're always together. That doesn't mean everyone's going to become a billionaire. It means there's space to think differently about what farming can be.
For people interested in prairie restoration and native seed production, the low commodity prices create an interesting dynamic. When corn and beans aren't penciling out, landowners start asking questions. Could CRP make sense? What about pollinator habitat? Is there money in specialty crops?
Different Paths Forward
The traditional commodity farming model requires serious infrastructure and scale. That hasn't changed. But the margins are getting tighter, which means farmers are looking for ways to diversify.
Native seed production offers one path. There are essentially two ways to make it work: either invest hundreds of thousands in infrastructure to handle high-volume crops like big bluestem and switchgrass, or go smaller and more specialized with hand-harvested wildflowers. Neither path is easy, but both exist.
The current market conditions mean more people are asking these questions. And when more people are asking questions, new solutions start emerging.
What History Teaches
The Dust Bowl taught Americans that you can't just plow up native prairie and expect the land to forgive you indefinitely. The 1980s taught farmers that debt is a double-edged sword, and that government policy matters more than anyone wants to admit.
This current moment? It's still being written.
But if history teaches anything, it's that farmers are resilient. They survived the Dust Bowl. They survived the 1980s. They'll survive this too—though not all in the same way, and not all farming the same ground.
The key is staying sharp, looking for opportunities, and being willing to adapt when the landscape shifts.
Because the snow globe is definitely shaking.
Interested in exploring native prairie as a diversification strategy? Hoksey Native Seeds offers prairie seed mixes designed for the Midwest, along with consultation services for landowners considering prairie restoration. Sometimes the best response to challenging commodity markets is thinking beyond corn and beans.
