March 20, 2026, 4:00 a.m. ET
For more than 50 years, Barb Kalbach helped her husband, Jim, run his fourth-generation family farm near Dexter, Iowa. When 77-year-old Jim retired in 2025, it was primarily because of his age, she says. And yet, she can’t help but admit: They feel lucky to have gotten out when they did.
“There’s just not enough money in farming anymore,” says Kalbach, who blames the industrialization of American agriculture. A mere generation ago, Jim’s was one of six farm families living and working on the same square mile. When Jim retired, no family farm remained.
“The concentration of markets is the biggest issue in farming today,” says Kalbach, who recalls a time when farmers grew “a little bit of everything.” Along with corn and soybeans, for example, the Kalbachs produced hay, and tended to hogs and cattle. When factory farming began to affect commodity prices, they gave up raising livestock. By the end of their run, only corn and soybeans were profitable.
Today, even those are precarious investments. “For so many years, China was the biggest buyer of American soybeans. They bought 25 percent of the soybeans produced in the United States, and we depended on that,” Kalbach says. “President Trump took care of that when he decided to put a tariff on anything China wanted to buy. He destroyed the soybean market for American farmers. Now, China is getting its soybeans from Brazil. And even if they come back, it will take years for them to trust us again in trade deals.”
Tariffs are just one challenge among many. Along with trade instability, American farmers deal with labor shortages, extreme weather, high interest rates, rising input costs and lower commodity prices, all of which threaten the bottom line. As a result, lenders expect fewer than half of agricultural producers to be profitable in 2026 — the lowest share since 2020, according to a November 2025 survey by the American Bankers Association and Farmer Mac.
Because they’re retired, the Kalbachs don’t have to worry anymore about profits. But millions of other agricultural producers do, says Dana DiPrima, founder of the For Farmers Movement, which provides financial support to small and medium-sized farms that need help repairing equipment, recovering from natural disasters, expanding operations or maintaining productive land.
“Farmers are dealing with a tremendous amount of uncertainty right now,” DiPrima says. “But they aren’t sitting around crying in their soup. They’re pivoting. They’re being creative. They’re looking everywhere — under every rug, for every cent — to try to figure out, ‘How can I make this business work?’”
Whether their business is vegetables, livestock or dairy, farmers’ most fertile crop is their own grit. Here, three producers share how they’re turning fragility into fecundity:
Brothers in agriculture
Their father survived the farm crisis of the 1980s. Now, brothers and third-generation farmers Andy and Dan DeVries are weathering their own crises on their own farms — Andy in Monroe, Iowa, and Dan in neighboring Prairie City.
“We’re raising commodity crops,” explains Dan, who says the brothers’ primary crops are corn and soybeans. “There’s nothing special about my corn versus somebody else’s. We’re all receiving the same commodity price, but everybody chooses their own machinery, seed, chemicals and fertilizer. That’s how we make money by managing our margins. With the ever-rising price of inputs, our margins are being compressed, which is making it very difficult for farmers. We’re feeling really, really squeezed.”
Paying for fertilizer has been especially difficult due to tariffs on Canadian potash. “The political powers that have slapped a 15% tariff (at the time of reporting) on the inputs we need from Canada,” Dan says. “That extra 15 % gets put on our back, so we have to find that money somewhere in our budget to still break even.”
To generate extra revenue, Dan raises cattle while Andy operates a land improvement business. What’s most helped their bottom line, however, is DIY farming.
“We’re trying to bring as much back in-house as possible,” Andy says. “We’re spreading our own fertilizer, spraying our own crops and doing our own soil sampling. Those are things we’ve outsourced in the past, so doing them ourselves is the best thing we can do to protect our margins.”
Ranching partners
Last year was a rollercoaster for cattle ranchers. On the one hand, a years-long trend of downsizing herds caused cattle prices to surge, which generated increased profits for many ranchers. On the other hand, high prices created irate consumers — and an irate president, who launched an investigation into meatpackers for price manipulation, announced plans to quadruple low-tariff imports of Argentinian beef and reversed a 40% tariff his administration had previously imposed on Brazilian beef imports, all of which caused a precipitous drop in cattle futures.
Although the highs and lows gave many ranchers whiplash, Calli Williams of Letcher, South Dakota, wasn’t one of them. TW Angus — the ranch she co-owns with her husband, Tate — has been consistently in the black thanks to its unique business model.
When they established their ranch in 2015, Calli and Tate sold bulls privately to individual buyers. In 2022, however, they expanded their operation with an online bull sale. Held annually in March, it allows them to reach more customers in more places. Bulls that aren’t saleable become steer for the ranch’s beef market, a direct-to-consumer enterprise through which local families can purchase beef by the pound or buy beef shares — freezer beef sold in quarters, halves or wholes.
“When you’re a rancher, you’re an entrepreneur,” Williams says. “You’re dedicated to taking care of your livestock and your land, but you know there will be years when the markets won’t be in your favor. So, you have to find ways to diversify. That’s what we’ve done.”
Modern milkman
Fifth-generation dairy farmer Seth Bahler says dairy farming is cyclical. “There are good years and bad years and mediocre years, and where we are now is not good,” says Bahler, CEO of Oakridge Dairy in Ellington, Connecticut.
In October 2025, Oakridge’s income from milk was $250,000 less than it was in January 2025, reports Bahler, who cites the negative impact of tariffs.
“Almost 20% of U.S. milk is exported in the form of cheeses, powders and other things,” he says. “When tariffs change, the swing in milk prices is huge. So, we’ve taken a beating.”
“Even so, Oakridge’s prospects are strong thanks to strategic investments in alternative revenue streams. In 2018, Bahler founded the Modern Milkman, a subscription-based home-delivery service designed to revive the milkman of yore using modern logistics and payment systems. In 2024, Oakridge opened its own bottling plant, which allows it to control the entire supply chain, from milking to processing and packaging. And just last year, it opened a 24/7, self-serve farm store offering farm-fresh, single-source milk and beverages in returnable glass bottles.
This month, it will launch its latest venture: Moozy, a Gen Z-oriented line of flavored milks sold in aluminum cans.
“We don’t want to be just a commodity producer. Our goal is to build a high-quality brand that’s focused on a premium product and a really good connection with consumers,” Bahler says.
