| New reporting finds that the agricultural community is struggling to get by under Republicans’ disastrous economy as a growing number of Iowa farmers file for bankruptcy.
Farmers are being forced into “extreme financial distress” – grappling with growing debt, increasing health care costs, and uncertainty around tariffs.
One central Iowa farmer noted “You can’t just have a conversation about high fertilizer prices or where you project soybean prices will be because of trade uncertainty. You also have to look at your health-care insurance premiums that may be doubling in the coming year.”
REMINDER: Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn own this. Miller-Meeks and Nunn repeatedly voted to protect the reckless tariffs hurting Iowa farmers. And rather than lowering costs, Miller-Meeks and Nunn allowed ACA tax credits to near expiration, leaving Iowans’ health care premiums to double on average.
DCCC Spokesperson Katie Smith:
“Thanks to Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn, Iowa’s farmers are facing what they describe as ‘extreme financial distress’ as record numbers file for bankruptcy. Miller-Meeks and Nunn own this: from siding with Trump’s reckless tariffs, to raising health care costs across the state, Miller-Meeks and Nunn have made it clear that their D.C. party bosses come first and Iowa farmers and families come last.”
Read more:
Des Moines Register: With falling profits, Iowa farmers facing ‘extreme financial distress,’ more bankruptcies
- When it comes to farm downturns, Joseph Peiffer has a good gauge on severity.
- He grew up on a farm and in his career as a bankruptcy attorney in Cedar Rapids, he has worked with farmers in financial distress since the 1980s Farm Crisis, trying to find a way for them to continue their operations.
- With row-crop farmers now struggling with three years of falling profits, Peiffer says he’s seeing “extreme financial distress” across Iowa and the Midwest at a “level higher than I’ve seen in a long time.”
- Iowa farmers filed the second-largest number of bankruptcies nationally in the first half of the year, already twice as many as last year and the most since 2021.
- Bankruptcies will likely grow as farmers talk with lenders in the weeks ahead about this year’s returns and how to finance next year’s crops, farm and bankruptcy experts say. Crop prices are projected to be below or at the costs to grow the crops.
- Farm groups and experts worry that this downturn could echo the Farm Crisis of the ’80s, one of the worst recessions in Iowa’s history.
- In Trump’s second term, he’s again battling over trade with China, Mexico, Canada and other large buyers of U.S. farm goods, resulting in tit-for-tat tariffs.
- “There are a lot of things working against farmers — all at the same time,” said Aaron Lehman, a central Iowa farmer and the Iowa Farmers Union board president.
- Like other Iowans, farmers also are struggling to get — or keep — off-farm jobs, given Iowa’s slowing economy, he said. The Des Moines Register reported in October that Iowa lost 5,400 manufacturing jobs, many tied to agriculture, from July 2024 through July 2025.
- And farmers are getting hit with bigger expenses, like rising health-care costs, due in part to the expected expiration of tax credits through the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, Lehman said.
- “You can’t just have a conversation about high fertilizer prices or where you project soybean prices will be because of trade uncertainty,” Lehman said. “You also have to look at your health-care insurance premiums that may be doubling in the coming year.”
- He said he worries some farmers will be forced to make “terrible choices,” like foregoing health insurance and risking a financially devastating medical catastrophe. “That’s what scares me.”
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