Mississippi farmers face losses due to inflation, poor market conditions

by Samuel Hughes and Kennedi Drake with contributions from Rowan Luke, Rasheed Ambrose, Gretta Graves, Gerome Webster, Hailey Perkins, and Evan Baronich

LUMBERTON—Farmers in southeast Mississippi are facing rising production costs, making it harder to stay profitable. 

With crop prices fluctuating and economic uncertainty ahead, many are searching for new solutions to sustain their livelihoods. 

The costs of farm production, like supplies and labor, have increased dramatically in recent years while international market forces have driven prices down, leaving farmers facing losses after harvest. 

In a recent Mississippi Senate Committee hearing, experts within Mississippi agriculture presented data on the issue. Pinion Global, an agriculture accounting firm, reported to the Senate that among a sample of 22 large producers in the Delta region, farmers lost $22 million across 153,000 acres last year.  

Using those numbers across Mississippi’s 3.5 million acres of farmland, that amounts to roughly $550 million in losses, according to Pinion. Inflation has increased by 51% since 2007, while operational costs for row crop producers—those growing soybeans, corn, cotton and rice—have more than doubled. Pinion reported that labor costs under the federal H-2A program, which employs foreign workers in U.S. agriculture, have also increased in recent years. 

Rising costs and shrinking profits  

Mike McCormick, president of the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation, said the state’s agriculture sector is experiencing its greatest challenge in recent decades. Row crop producers are facing another year of loss in 2025 despite a record-breaking crop yield last year. 

“Historically, there’s always been a hole that the (row crop) farmers could find — there’s one commodity that they could grow and make money off of,” McCormick said. “There’s just none of them out there right now.” 

According to a nationwide report by Terrain, a team of agricultural economists, farms producing soybeans and corn have seen a 45% decrease in net cash farm income since 2022, the lowest in the past 15 years. 

The report also states that row crop producers did not see profit in 2024. McCormick said future projections do not indicate profitability for those producers in 2025. 

McCormick said that some agricultural lenders, concerned about future cost and price projections, may deny farmers loans to plant their crops this year—uncertain farmers will have the assets to pay back their debt after harvest. 

“Most farmers have crop loans. Very few of them can self-fund their own operation. So, they’re at the banks with higher interest rates, with their hat in their hands, trying to show them a budget that at least potentially works for them to come back in and pay the bank back for the money that they’re getting. That’s getting harder and harder,” McCormick said. 

Adapting to survive price shifts 

Conversely, the outlook differs for many southeastern Mississippi farmers, where diversified agricultural production offers more stability. John and Liz Corley, owners of Corley Farms outside Lumberton, grow row crops like corn and soybeans but also raise cattle. 

“All of our inputs have been in this inflationary period of increasing, and we’ve seen those double and triple. Liz and I, we moved to growing row crops with cattle, because it’s a diversification of the farm income,” John Corley said. “When you look over history, normally when one commodity is high, the other one will be low, or vice versa.” 

According to Terrain’s report, net cash farm income on cattle farms increased 183% since 2022, while other livestock farms have seen an increase of 54%. 

Brennan Ferguson, owner of Ferguson Family Farms in Perkinston, said while his farm has tried various agricultural outputs, current market conditions have led his family to transition to livestock production. 

“At one time, we’ve done a U-pick. We’ve done a lot of vegetables, different things, and then as things progressed—COVID-19 and different things hit—we kind of transferred over into selling our pork. We raise Duroc, Yorkshire and Hampshire hogs, and we cross-breed and get a good meat quality hog,” Ferguson said. “Equipment, fuel, feed—it all fluctuates up and down. So, we have to just go off of what the economy is doing.” 

Corley noted that not all Mississippi farmers have the option to diversify their output. Those with significant investments in row crop equipment—often totaling millions—cannot afford to let the equipment sit idle. 

“Here in the hilly country, we can raise livestock easier than we can grow grain, but in the Delta and other regions, maybe their only means of income is row crop, and so, they’re really struggling. There are a number of people that invested heavily in equipment and in other things to produce more (row crops) and then all of a sudden, the market has kind of collapsed,” Corley said. 

An uncertain market 

The agriculture industry is volatile and is heavily influenced by international forces, according to Will Maples, an agricultural economist at Mississippi State University. 

Maples said that, for example, the U.S. has historically traded much of its soybean crop to China, but recent trade conflicts have led China to favor Brazil as its primary supplier. That, combined with a global stockpile of soybeans, has brought prices down. 

The price of cotton, which is largely dependent on consumer demand of products like clothing and furniture, has fallen due to inflation, making such purchases less attractive, according to Maples. 

The price of corn, however, has defied past projections of a lower price. A low yield in the Midwest had led to better margins for some Mississippi farmers planting corn, but Maples warned that as more farmers turn to corn in hopes of profitability, prices will likely drop again. 

Meanwhile, recent droughts across the U.S. have tightened livestock herd numbers, driving up prices amid strong consumer demand. This has made livestock production a more viable way for farmers to cover expenses. 

Maples said if anything is certain about the international agriculture market, it is that prices will rise and fall. 

“It could be two years, five years—eventually, it will get back out of it. It just rolls up and down year to year, but really, the question is, ‘How long it will last?’ That is where the uncertainty lies,” Maples said. 

Smaller farmers, limited by available acreage and equipment, will face more greater financial pressure from these market forces than larger operations, especially during extended periods of low prices. 

McCormick said these challenges are pushing the average row crop farmer—who, in Mississippi, is about 60 years old—to retire, while simultaneously making it harder for younger farmers to secure loans to enter the industry.  

“We’ve got a lot of the older guys that probably made some money over years, and are looking at, ‘Why am I continuing to do this? I might as well stop and retire.’ At the same time, they’re not being able to find anybody to come in and buy them out and start over as a young farmer,” McCormick said. “I think we’re consolidating, where some of the bigger farmers that want to stay in are just getting bigger and taking up some of this land from people that want to retire, but certainly, there’s a breaking point … if they continue to lose money, they’re not going to have the resources to keep going. That’s why we need a farm bill.”  

Push for policy solutions 

In December, Congress passed the American Relief Act of 2025, a large disaster relief package that included $10 billion in direct aid for row crop producers nationwide. Once distributed, the aid will help farmers present stronger financial statements to agriculture lenders. 

While the aid will help get crops in the ground this year, McCormick said a new farm bill is needed to provide long-term stability against international market shifts. 

The 2018 Farm Bill, a landmark piece of federal legislation, provides key relief programs, including crop insurance and agricultural disaster assistance. The bill expired in 2023 and is facing a third extension as Congress debates a new version. 

McCormick said that commodity prices set in the 2018 legislation are outdated, and farmers are not receiving the intended level of federal relief. 

“They have targeted prices in the 2018 Farm Bill that were set that no longer work because of inflationary reasons. The price needs to go up to trigger the payments to the farmers for this crop insurance they’re buying,” McCormick said. “2018 was a long time ago, and just like anything else, a lot of the language needs to be cleaned up.” 

Beyond farming, the Farm Bill covers a broad scope of programs, from food assistance to environmental conservation, making it a contentious issue in Congress. 

Republican state Sen. Andy Berry, a cattle farmer and vice chair of the upper chamber’s Agriculture Committee, said the state is working support farmers as they await a new farm bill, with much of the effort focused on local tax policy. 

Lawmakers in the state Legislature have separate plans that could redistribute taxes across the state economy. 

Farmers may own or rent large stretches of land, making property taxes, which fund local services like schools and law enforcement, a considerable expense. 

“A lot of us in agriculture that work here at the Capitol are keeping an eye out … that when we’re adjusting the income or the grocery or the fuel tax, that that does not cause local county governments to raise ad valorem, property taxes, on our farmers,” Berry said. 

Berry, Maples and McCormick said row crop prices will eventually stabilize, partly because farmers are leaving the sector due to low prices. With less producers and less product, prices will increase. 

“I hate that that might be the case, but I believe it is,” Berry said. “You know, there’s an old saying in agriculture—that low prices fix low prices, high prices fix high prices, that the market will eventually work out.” 

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