Red Ink, Year Six: Farm Bureau Sees $32 Billion Crop Loss in 2027 as Pressure Builds for New Aid Package
Every major row crop is projected to stay under water for a second straight year, specialty crop assistance covers as little as 5% of estimated losses, and war-driven fuel and fertilizer costs are squeezing margins further — giving bipartisan momentum to President Trump’s $11 billion supplemental request.
American agriculture is staring at a sixth consecutive year of losses, and the hole is getting deeper, not shallower. That is the central finding of a new Market Intel analysis (link) released Thursday by economists Faith Parum, Ph.D., and Daniel Munch of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), who estimate that farmers growing the nine principal row crops will lose $32 billion in 2027 — measured as national average returns over total costs, without federal assistance — on top of a projected $31 billion loss in 2026. Layer on more than $7 billion in largely uncovered 2025 specialty crop losses and production costs that keep climbing amid the Iran conflict, and the Farm Bureau economists conclude that another round of economic assistance, plus longer-term policy fixes, is needed to keep many operations solvent into the next crop year.
Key Points
• Deeper losses ahead: AFBF projects a $32 billion loss on nine principal crops in 2027, worse than the $31 billion expected in 2026 and the sixth straight year of negative returns over total costs for most major row crops — with some sectors facing a seventh year of red ink.
• No crop escapes: On a per-acre basis, every crop analyzed stays below breakeven in 2027. Corn losses deepen from $131 to $167 per acre, soybeans from $80 to $138, wheat from $114 to $145 and cotton from $342 to $406.
• Specialty crops largely uncovered: Six representative fruit, vegetable and nut crops lost more than $7 billion in 2025, but ASCF payment rates cover only about 5% to 28% of estimated per-acre losses for the crops analyzed.
• Aid politics: President Trump requested more than $11 billion in additional agricultural assistance in late June — $10 billion for row and specialty crops planted in 2026 and $1.1 billion for storm-hit Florida producers — with bipartisan backing from House and Senate Agriculture committee leaders. Congress still must assemble the package and settle program details.
• Beyond checks: AFBF wants structural fixes: year-round E15, a modernized five-year farm bill that protects interstate commerce, an agricultural labor fix and better data to build workable risk management tools for specialty crops.
A Sixth Year Under Water — and Getting Worse
The Parum-Munch analysis pairs USDA’s June 30 Acreage report with Economic Research Service cost-of-production data, WASDE supply-and-demand estimates and FAPRI projections to build a national profit-and-loss picture for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, sorghum, oats, barley and peanuts. The result is sobering. After the profit spike of 2020-21 — inflated by pandemic-era government payments and a China-driven export surge — returns collapsed in 2022 and have stayed negative since. The projected $32 billion 2027 loss would rank among the worst in the two-decade series AFBF tracks, exceeded only by the $35 billion shortfall of 2024 and 2025’s $33 billion.
Estimated national average returns over total costs without federal assistance, nine principal crops. Source: American Farm Bureau Federation, from USDA NASS, ERS, WASDE and FAPRI data.
Two caveats matter for reading these numbers. First, the 2026 and 2027 figures are projections, not realized losses — farmers can still adjust acreage and inputs, and weather, yields and prices will move. The 2027 estimate assumes crop prices hold at 2026 levels. Second, “returns over total costs” is an economic measure that includes imputed costs such as land rent equivalents and unpaid operator labor. Cash margins are less catastrophic than the headline figure implies, which is why most farms are still operating. But the direction is unambiguous: equity and working capital are being drawn down year after year, and that erosion is cumulative.
Analysis: that is the argument AFBF is really making to Congress — not that every farm loses $32 billion in cash, but that six straight years of sub-breakeven economics is a structural problem no single-year patch has fixed.
Row Crops: Losses on Every Acre
USDA’s June 30 Acreage report set the baseline: total principal crop acres are down 1.91 million from 2025, a 0.6% decline. Corn planted area came in at 95.3 million acres — down 3% but still the fourth highest since 1944 — while soybeans rose 5% to 85.4 million acres and all-wheat fell 6% to 42.7 million. The shift toward soybeans reflects relative input costs more than optimism: soybeans simply cost less to plant when fertilizer is expensive.
Applied to those acres, the per-acre arithmetic is grim across the board. Cotton remains the deepest hole at a projected $406-per-acre loss in 2027, followed by rice at $373 and oats at $316. Peanuts ($244), sorghum ($207), corn ($167), wheat ($145) and soybeans ($138) round out the list — and in every case the 2027 projection is worse than 2026. In aggregate dollars, corn carries the largest projected loss at $15.8 billion, followed by soybeans at $11.6 billion, wheat at $6.6 billion and cotton at $3.8 billion; summed across all nine crops, projected 2027 losses reach $41.4 billion. (The $32 billion headline figure nets that against crops and regions that perform better than average; the $41.4 billion is the simple sum of per-crop losses.)
Estimated national average returns over total costs without federal assistance, dollars per acre, 2025/26–2027/28. Source: American Farm Bureau Federation.
Analysis: note what is driving the deterioration between 2026 and 2027 — it is almost entirely the cost side. AFBF assumes flat prices, so the deepening losses trace to fertilizer, fuel, seed, machinery and interest costs that are projected to reach new highs in 2027. The Iran conflict has kept energy and nitrogen markets volatile, and AFBF’s own survey work documents fertilizer availability problems layered on top of price. That matters politically: cost-push losses are harder to hedge or market around than price weakness, strengthening the case that this is not a problem producers can manage their way out of alone.
Specialty Crops: Big Losses, Thin Coverage, Poor Data
For fruit, vegetable and tree nut growers the story is harder to quantify but no less painful. Consistent public data on specialty crop production costs and farm-gate prices simply do not exist for many crops — a data gap the authors stress should not be mistaken for an absence of hardship. AFBF’s earlier case-study work on six crops representing roughly a quarter of specialty crop receipts — almonds, apples, blueberries, lettuce, potatoes and strawberries — pegged 2025 economic losses above $7 billion, led by almonds at an estimated $3.6 billion and apples at $1.4 billion.
Select specialty crops, 2025 estimated cost of production over estimated returns, $ millions. The hatched bar reflects losses in the many crops for which no reliable public data exist. Source: American Farm Bureau Federation, from USDA NASS data.
Washington’s response so far, the Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers (ASCF) program, delivered $1.625 billion — welcome, but AFBF calculates payment rates cover only about 5% to 28% of estimated 2025 per-acre losses for the crops analyzed. And 2026 market signals show no broad recovery. Potato growers planted 873,000 acres, down 3% and the smallest area since 1952, after a 2025 season in which the estimated open-market price of $6.88 per hundredweight sat far below full production costs of $12.25; early this year analysts reported some uncontracted potatoes moving at $2 to $3. Apple and wine grape producers were still rated unprofitable in June. Where prices have firmed — almonds on a short crop, strawberries after weather cut volumes — the gains largely reflect tighter supplies, meaning growers have less to sell and margins stay pinched.
The longer arc is a shrinking domestic footprint. Since 2000, U.S. vegetable acreage is down 41% and production has fallen from 37 million to 28 million metric tons; fruit acreage is down 37% with production nearly halved, from 51 million to 26 million metric tons. Tree nut output, which peaked at 3.7 million metric tons in 2020, slipped to 3.2 million by 2024.
Analysis: those trendlines are the quiet food security argument in this report. A country that talks about reducing reliance on imported food is steadily importing more of its produce as domestic capacity exits — driven by labor costs, import competition, water constraints and regulatory burden as much as by commodity prices. Payments alone will not reverse that; the data-collection and risk-management fixes AFBF is pushing are aimed at making specialty crops insurable, which is the precondition for keeping capital in the sector.
U.S. specialty crop production by category, million metric tons, 2000–2024. Source: American Farm Bureau Federation, from FAOSTAT data.
What Washington Has Done — and What’s Still on the Table
Congress and the administration have not been idle. The late-2024 American Relief Act delivered $10 billion through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program (ECAP) for 2023-24 losses; the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program added $11 billion in short-term relief for row crop producers; and USDA ultimately finalized $1.625 billion for specialty crop growers under ASCF, with sugar handled separately — more than $23 billion in all. H.R. 1 made durable improvements too: higher reference prices, expanded crop insurance options and other safety-net upgrades, with the first Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage payments under the new terms due in October 2026.
But the math has moved against producers since HR 1 passed. Input costs have kept rising while most commodity prices have gone sideways or lower, leaving row crop, specialty crop and alfalfa growers entering fall under intense strain. Hence the late-June request from President Trump for more than $11 billion in additional assistance — $10 billion for row and specialty crop producers with 2026 plantings and $1.1 billion for Florida producers hit by winter storms — paired with a call for Congress to pass year-round E15. Leaders of both parties on the House and Senate Agriculture committees have signaled support.
Analysis: the open questions now are legislative mechanics, not intent: what vehicle carries the supplemental, how quickly USDA could stand up delivery (ECAP’s sign-up infrastructure gives it a running start), and whether payment limits, AGI tests and the row-crop/specialty split match the loss data AFBF has laid out. The authors’ pointed language — the package must be “sufficiently robust and broadly structured” — reads as a marker against a deal that shortchanges specialty crops again. Watch, too, the timing mismatch: ARC/PLC money arrives in October 2026 for the 2025 crop, roughly a year after this fall’s cash-flow crunch hits operating-loan renewals. That lag is the strongest practical argument for bridge assistance now.
The Bottom Line
Parum and Munch frame the ask in two parts: near-term economic assistance to offset trade-related losses and conflict-driven input costs, and longer-term structural policy — swift farm bill implementation, year-round E15, protection of interstate commerce from a patchwork of state laws, an agricultural labor fix and stronger risk management tools built on better data. Six years of losses have already thinned working capital and farm balance sheets; a seventh, in some sectors, is now in the forecast. Without both the short-term bridge and the long-term fixes, the economists warn, more farm families will face the decision of whether to keep operating into the next crop year — with consequences that run through rural communities, farmland markets, ag lenders and ultimately the domestic supply of food, fuel and fiber.
