Illinois farmer Heather Hampton Knodle doesn’t take sleep medication, but with today’s farm economy, that night may come. Or at least that’s what she jokingly says about her sleepless nights.
“There’s a lot that keeps me up at night,” Hampton Knodle said. She farms corn and soybeans and double crops wheat in Montgomery County, Ill. Most troublesome, she said, is “we’re getting mixed signals.”
Like other U.S. farmers, Hampton Knodle is grappling with a multi-year double whammy of depressed grain prices paired with high costs for crop inputs and machinery, as well as continuing dissatisfaction with federal leadership and agriculture policy.
“What really keeps me up at night is the lack of understanding in governmental policies… and a lack of leadership over the last five years,” she said. “We still don’t have a (new) farm bill. And we don’t have a deeper understanding that you can’t make up for what’s essentially a two-year planting cycle in a one-week (market) rally.”
In some ways, 2025 was a banner year for U.S. row-crop farmers who harvested a corn crop exceeding 17 billion bushels, marking a new production record. But the bumper harvest is contributing to a global supply glut that’s likely to burden grain prices at least another year, keeping farmer margins under pressure despite strong demand from export and biofuels markets.
Recent government aid has helped, but Hampton Knodle would prefer profitable markets as she pondered what looks to be another challenging year.
“How do we ‘batten down the hatches’ but also become smarter in every possible way to find ways to protect our investment and not count government dollars in our balance sheets or a cash-flow analysis?” she wondered out loud.
Vibes “are a little off” in ag
Economists and analysts who spoke at AgMarket.Net’s annual conference in Nashville this week echoed Hampton Knodle’s concern for the farm economy. Nonetheless, come spring, planters across the country will be rolling again, and corn and soybean farmers will continue to do what they do.
“I get the sense that the vibes are a little bit off when it comes to production agriculture going into 2026,” University of Illinois economist Joe Janzen said at the Farming For Profit, Not Price conference. But Janzen doesn’t expect any significant pullback in planted acreage generally.
“Are we going to see farmers cutting back on planting? The short answer is, probably, not really,” Janzen said. “All the acres tend to get planted and everything we’re building into our projections for planted acres in 2026 suggests the acres will get planted.”
Barring a supply shock, such as a major drought that sparks a market rally, this year’s grain prices probably won’t cover the cost of production for many farmers. Janzen figures the break-even price for corn in central Illinois at about $4.71 per bushel in 2026, up from $4.58 in 2025. He sees the soybean break-even around $10.80, up from $10.62.
Based on a USDA forecast released in January, farm-level cash prices for corn are expected to average about $4.10 per bushel in the 2025-26 marketing year, down 3.3% from 2024-25. Soybeans are expected to average $10.20, up 2% from last year but down from $12.40 in 2023-24.
While demand remains strong, Janzen’s concern is “we're doing some amount of damage to our export business with the current trade policy that’s coming out of Washington. We’ve seen it in the bean market already. That piece is so critical because it is the piece that’s going to absorb a lot of excess supply when we have a big crop.”
Expect historically high corn acres
Corn production soared in 2025 after U.S. farmers planted 98.8 million acres, the highest acreage since 1936, and benefited from ample rainfall across most of the Midwest last summer. Soybean plantings fell to 81.2 million acres, the lowest since 2019.
Brian Burke, president of John Stewart & Associates, expects somewhat of a reversal in planted acres this year, but nothing dramatic. He sees corn plantings dropping to between 95 and 96 million acres while soybeans may increase to about 83 million acres. Why not a bigger shift? It comes down to which crop is expected to lose the least amount of money.
Market fundamentals might suggest “a more rotational type of bias, with lower corn and higher soybean acreage,” Burke said. “However, I don't know that it's going to be as much as you may think. If you talk to producers, most of them are going to be in the camp of: ‘At today’s prices, I have a better chance of getting toward break-even with corn than I do with beans.’”
U.S. corn stockpiles at the end of the 2025-26 marketing year are expected to swell to a seven-year high at 2.23 billion bushels, based on a USDA forecast. With plantings expected to remain historically high this year, Burke said there’s a “good chance” stocks may top 2 billion bushels in 2026-27, perhaps even reaching 2.4 billion bushels.
“It could be very much in the cards,” Burke said. “It’s a challenging supply situation to dig ourselves out of from where we’re at today.”
Farmers have more resources
Hampton Knodle grew up on her family’s farm during the 1980s crisis and still has fresh memories of the industry’s struggles during that difficult period. Tough times have returned again, but she believes the farm economy is better equipped to ride out the current down cycle. She said her three sons are all going into farming in some form or fashion.
“There’s more safeguards” today, she said. “There was a lot of learning from the ‘80s and there’s been a lot of investment in things like mental health support and creation of things like crop insurance.”
She also finds hope in the country’s spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation “because there is so much variability that creates opportunities.”
“We just have to be ready for it,” she said. “We still have an environment where we can innovate, and there’s not somebody dictating that to us.”
Cutting through the noise and understanding market signals are essential, Hampton Knodle added. “But ultimately also we too need to be innovating on the farm and not just finding ways to reduce costs… but finding other options,” she said. “We can’t just say, we’re the incumbent provider and we’ve got to do it the way we’ve always done it, just a little bit better.”