Happy Wednesday! ☕
Grab your coffee and pull up a chair — today's a bit of a gut-check edition.
We're digging into a comparison nobody loves making, but everybody's making anyway: this farm economy vs. the 1980s.
We've also got word that U.S. farmland may have finally topped out, and a fresh price tag on what your fields would look like without glyphosate.
Let's get into it.
🗄️ The Big Bin: Farm Economy Flashbacks to the '80s
What happened: A new Harvest Public Media investigation, published this week, put real numbers behind a feeling a lot of producers already have in their gut.
Sixth-generation Wisconsin farmer Pat Mullooly — whose parents white-knuckled their operation through the 1980s farm crisis — is watching this year's margins with the same unease his folks had decades ago.
The piece is the first in a new "Tough Times" series tracking the financial stress hitting American farms in 2026.
Why it happened: The comparison isn't just vibes.
Back in the '80s, a nosedive in crop prices and farmland values, paired with a mountain of farm debt and sky-high interest rates, wiped out an estimated 300,000 U.S. farms by the end of the decade.
Today's version of the same story: crop prices stuck in the mud, input costs that haven't budged, and margins that keep coming in negative — enough that even well-capitalized operations are starting to sweat.
What it means for the farm gate: Prairie producers aren't immune to this math.
Canola and wheat growers are staring down the same price-vs-input squeeze as their Midwest counterparts — this isn't a made-in-America problem.
The '80s crisis didn't hit everyone the same; it hit the most leveraged operations hardest. If you expanded hard on cheap credit the last few years, this is your reminder to run the stress test now, not next spring.
Rural mental-health and financial-counselling lines (the Canadian equivalents of Nebraska's Rural Response Hotline) exist for a reason — use them before things get to crisis mode, not after.