Swimming Naked
The world record holder walked away
The room smells like coffee and crisis.
The Alerus Center in Grand Forks is packed. Agronomists, consultants, salespeople. Coffee and caramel rolls. Everyone trying to figure out how to keep their growers from going under.
You can smell the desperation underneath the Folgers. That, and the guy behind me wearing far too much Aqua Velva.
Two years ago, this room buzzed with talk about biologicals, yield maximization, and the future of agriculture.
Today, the lunchroom was quiet as a church.
Chicken's still dry. Same as every year. So it's not the food.
Everybody’s searching for the silver bullet. Something to take home to the farmers sitting in their shop right now, staring at spreadsheets that don’t work, no matter how many times they run the numbers.
Meanwhile, down in Georgia, Alex Harrell just walked away from half his rented ground.
Chew on that for a second.
This is the guy who holds the world record for soybean yield. Back-to-back years. 206 bushels per acre in 2023. Then 218 bushels in 2024.
The man literally grows soybeans better than anyone on the planet, and he’s dropping 3,000 acres because the math doesn’t work. Notified twelve landlords in a three-week window. Tightened his circle from a 21-mile radius to 10 miles because he can’t afford to put a tractor on a highway.
“We are literally paying to farm, not getting paid to farm,” Harrell told AgWeb. “We’ve now got guys with all their land and equity burned up, and we’re seeing Chapter 12 bankruptcies every day.”
Irrigated land in Georgia sat idle in 2025.
More will sit in 2026.
And if you think this is just a Georgia problem, you’re not paying attention.
Around my area, three bucks an acre profit is winning.
Three dollars. That’s beating most of your neighbors. If you broke even, congratulations, you’re doing better than damn near everyone around you.
The bar is below ground, and we’re still tripping over it.
So here I am at this Agvise soil fertility seminar, surrounded by people I don’t recognize, watching Brad Carlson from University of Minnesota Extension put up a slide that makes my blood pressure spike.
The numbers from 2024:
The top 20% most profitable farms spent $170 per acre on fertilizer.
The bottom 20% spent $224 per acre.
That’s a 31% difference. Fifty-four dollars an acre.
The most profitable guys are spending less on fertility. Not more. Less.
And what are the bankers telling everyone? This is not the time to try anything different. Stay the course. Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t rock the boat.
Which translates to: keep losing money the same way you have the last two seasons, because at least it’s familiar.
And that's before you get to the regulatory side.
Carlson mentioned he’s receiving letters from “The Friends of the Mississippi River” and other environmental groups urging a limit on nitrogen applications.
The world is telling us to use less fertilizer; the data shows the profitable guys already are, yet the industry response is to freeze. To do nothing. To wait for someone else to figure it out while the Chapter 12s pile up.
We run lean on fertility. Have for two years. Our nitrogen trials showed we could cut from 200 pounds to 140 pounds without losing a bushel. That’s $60 an acre. Real money. Maybe the difference between surviving and joining Harrell on the list of guys walking away.
But try telling that to a farmer whose agronomist has been pushing 200 units for twenty years because that’s what the book says. Or the co-op that makes its margin by selling more product, not less. Or the banker whose risk models don’t have a line item for soil biology.
The Alerus is full of people searching for something to save their growers. The answer is on the screen. Has been for years.
Spend less.
Not on everything. Seed cost isn’t where the separation happens. It’s fertility. The thing we’ve been overapplying for decades because more is always better, right?
More nitrogen, more yield, more profit.
Except that’s not what the numbers say.
This is the way it’s supposed to ebb and flow.
Marginal ground is coming out of production. Land rents are falling. In theory, this corrects over time. Commodity prices rise, equilibrium returns, agriculture stabilizes.
But who’s left when it does?
Harrell will survive. He’s smart, he’s tightening his circle, he’s cutting equipment. But when that land comes back into production, when rents hit a floor that makes sense, he’s probably not the one picking it back up.
It’ll be some operation with deep pockets that can afford to wait out the cycle. Some investors who bought the ground at the bottom from a family that couldn’t hang on.
More consolidation. More hollowing out of rural America. More empty main streets, shuttered implement dealers, and schools that can’t fill a team roster.
The market is working exactly as designed.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: the only reason this hasn’t already collapsed is land values.
For more than a decade, guys have been losing money on operations while their net worth keeps climbing because the dirt is worth more every year. Cash flow negative, equity positive. Banks keep lending because the collateral is solid. On paper, everyone’s fine. In the checkbook, everyone’s drowning.
A couple of good years after the Russia/Ukraine thing gave some breathing room, but the underlying math has been broken for a long time. Equity gains made it possible to refinance, restructure, and keep going another year.
If land values go, watch out. It’s 1988 again. John Cougar Mellencamp and Rain on the Scarecrow and all that. The collateral vanishes. The lending tightens. The cash flow problems hiding behind appreciating assets suddenly have nowhere to hide.
That’s when the Chapter 12s turn into a wave. That’s when the auctions actually materialize. That’s when the real pain starts.
And the mental health repercussions of all this. God. That’s why I started writing in the first place. Because nobody talks about what it does to a person to watch everything they built, everything their family built, slip away while the banker tells them to stay the course.
The shame of it. The isolation. The way rural men, especially, have been trained to suffer in silence until they can’t anymore.
I’ve seen what that silence turns into.
And that’s what keeps me up more than any of the economics.
The tide is finally going out. We’re about to find out who’s been swimming naked, as Warren Buffett would say.
And it’s not just farmers exposed. How many banks have their asses on the line after years of overextending credit based on land values that only go up? How many ag lenders are sitting on loan portfolios that only make sense if the collateral holds?
In my last article, I talked about how the upcoming farm rescue package isn’t even for farmers. It’s for the whole system that’s been running on fumes for a dozen years.
Meanwhile, Deere stock is near an all-time high. The input providers are doing fine. I don’t blame them. They’re playing the game the way it’s designed to be played. They’ll get their piece of whatever assistance package comes through because they’ve got the lobby money to make sure of it.
Farmer gets a check that doesn’t cover his losses, and the money flows right back upstream to the companies that set the prices and the banks that fronted the credit.
And we haven’t even touched the real elephant in this stale-cookie conference room:
South America.
Brazil doesn’t give a shit if American farmers are struggling. They’re not slowing down. They’re not waiting for us to figure it out. They’ve added 50 million acres of soybean production in the last twenty years, while we’ve been arguing about whether to cut nitrogen rates.
They’re coming for our markets whether we adapt or not.
Most guys think this is just another cycle. It’ll bounce back. It always does. But the combination of interest rates normalizing, land values plateauing, global competition intensifying, and input costs staying stubbornly high doesn’t feel like a cycle.
It feels like a realignment. A structural shift.
Now look. I could be wrong. A war breaks out, geopolitics shift, trade policy changes overnight, a new farm bill rewrites the rules.
Any of that could make everything I’m saying obsolete by next week.
But as it stands right now, walking into 2026, this thing isn’t done yet. And the room at the Alerus Center knows it. You can feel it in the silence between presenters, the moments when people used to ask questions.
I know this is heavy. But I’m sitting in this room full of people searching for answers, and the answers are right there. On the screen. In the data.
The profitable farms are spending less on fertility. The regulatory pressure is coming whether we adapt or not. The world-record soybean grower just cut his operation in half because even being the best isn’t enough anymore.
And somewhere, a banker is telling a farmer that this isn’t the time to try anything different.
The crisis isn’t the prices or the inputs. It’s the paralysis.
The answers are on the screen. The room stays quiet.
The chicken was dry. Coffee burnt. And three dollars an acre is winning.
You want to see what consolidation looks like? Drive from Amarillo to Wichita Falls on US-287. A couple hundred miles of cotton and winter wheat. No farms.
I pulled off at a town halfway through. Empty town square. Storefronts boarded up. Looked like a set from The Walking Dead, except nobody was coming back to film another season.
Saw my hometown in thirty years. Knocked the Buc-ees banana creme pie down a couple pegs. Broke my damn heart.
There’s your peek into the future. That’s what happens when the land stays in production, but the people don’t.
Happy New Year. Welcome to 2026.
Carlson defended his methodology today because he catches hell about it all the time.
Here’s that link if you want to dig in:
Wow. As someone with little to no experience in commodity agriculture you’ve articulated so much here. Thank you for showing up in the hard rooms and sharing
there is only one thing under the farmers direct control, the dollar amount he agrees to write on the check. Those that win the game are the ones who understand this reality and actually do something about it. In the corn belt the farmer spends on average 75-80 cents to generate $1 of income. The Big time operators are spending 85+ cents to generate $1 because they only got big one way, They paid more for rent than anyone else was willing too.
Yes they can get their crop inputs for less on a per acre basis but they spend more on everything else (you think the three girls in the office to take care of the bookkeeping etc come free?) All of that new fancy equipment to farm the 15,000 acres doesn't actually lower your cost of production either. Its like this. Spend another $100,000 per year in equipment deprecation to save $25,000 on Fertilizer costs. So are we making that up on more volume??? But I saved on my income taxes via Sec 179 exp yes but you also agreed to another $150,000 per year in loan payments which you historically haven't been able to generate? This is how you end up going broke folks.
Land values are a lagging indicator. In the 1980's land values continued to rise long after the actual profitability disappeared, The break in value came after Farm Credit decided it had to protect itself and pulled the plug on making loans (look and you will see that they actually shrank in total dollars loaned out starting in 1982 through the early 1990's I was there and saw it first hand) Every Crisis is caused by the contraction of new credit. The higher we go on land values in this environment of poor operating earnings ($32,000 per acre on some land sale in Iowa last month, Farm ground being sold to a farmer for farming) while the earnings are headed the other way the harder the crash is going to be.