What Mid-West Farm Report heard from the 2026 Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum this week is that farmers are looking at the third straight year of negative margins for staple crops like corn and soybeans. Government aid is coming down the pipeline, but economists are critical that it is solely a temporary fix.
Paul Mitchell, Director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at UW-Madison, says the financial pressure has some farm families reaching a breaking point. What are the indicators? Farm bankruptcies are on the rise.
According to federal court data, Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings reached 293 nationally by Sep. 30, 2025, already surging past the 213 filings recorded for the entirety of 2024. Wisconsin alone saw filings jump from two at the end of 2024 to 13 by the fall of 2025, Mitchell says.
He explains the primary driver of this instability is a widening gap between the cost of production and market returns. For many producers, the math simply doesn’t add up. Production costs are hovering around $4.90 per bushel for corn, and market prices are lagging at $4.10. Farmers are swallowed by an 80-cent negative margin.
“I would encourage farmers to look at their cost of production divided by their expected yield to get a sense of their break-even price,” Mitchell notes. “But in general, 2026 is the third year of negative margins for crops like corn and soybeans, which is really tough.”
This environment is creating a “tale of two farms”: those with high equity who can survive by borrowing against land value, and those who are highly leveraged and facing immediate cash-flow failures. For older farmers without a clear succession plan, the current climate is prompting many to exit the industry entirely to preserve what equity they have left.
While federal ad hoc programs have injected billions of dollars into the system to provide short-term relief, Mitchell warns that these measures are a temporary band-aid. He says federal aid doesn’t address the structural shift in global trade, such as the rapid expansion of corn and soybean production in South America, particularly Brazil, which has challenged the dominance of U.S. exports.
