Farmers across the Midwest are trying to figure out how to get by at a time when expected prices for commodities from corn, to wheat, to cattle, to hogs mean they’ll be struggling just to break even. “Prices are low, bins are full, and the dollar is strengthening as we speak, and that’s just making the export thing a little more challenging,” says Paul Burgener of Platte Valley Bank in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Burgener says the problem is oversupply. Farmers responded to booming prices in the early part of the decade by planting more crops and improving their land. Soon, crop production outpaced demand. “We did what most people would do if they had a factory and had a lot of demand: you expand,” says Brent Gloy, a Purdue University economist who also farms in southwest Nebraska. American farmers aren’t alone, Gloy says. Farms have been expanding across the globe. “In South America from 2004 to 2014, they added roughly 86 million acres of principal crops,” he says. That is roughly equal,
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