Farmers growing increasingly desperate amid rising energy and fertilizer prices
Source: msn/Axios
9h
Farmers across the Midwest are entering planting season under mounting financial pressure, as the Iran conflict drives up diesel and fertilizer prices — deepening an agricultural downturn that some say is the worst since the crisis of the 1980s.
Why it matters: Rising fuel and fertilizer costs threaten to push more family farms out of business, drive up food prices and further strain rural economies already battered by trade disruptions, inflation and extreme weather.
The big picture: Mark Mueller — a northeast Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association — tells Axios that the current landscape is more challenging than at any time since the 1980s farm crisis, when interest rates soared and exports plunged, triggering agricultural bank failures.
The stresses are showing, with rising bankruptcies and lenders becoming more reluctant to provide farmers with operational loans. "There's going to be fewer farmers next year than there is this year," Mueller says.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/farmers-growing-increasingly-desperate-amid-rising-energy-and-fertilizer-prices/ar-AA23l4yN
= new reply since forum marked as read
What's that old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me? I think that's it. 
on various news channels blubbering and crying about how the tariffs and resultant blowback were killing them and how China had completely zeroed out their orders, not a single dollar of soybeans bought from the US the entire prior quarter (Q2)... And I thought that sounded familiar. And I was right, it did. Because that. was. exactly. what. happened. in. 2018.
You know, right before most of those farmers voted for this guy. Twice more.
Jesus Christ. 
I can get all my meat, fruit and vegetables from South American countries. The farmers voted for this, not me.
!!!!!!
