Farmers Were Already Hurting. The Iran War Made It Worse.

Farmers are struggling. And while the Trump administration has insisted inflation woes will end when the war with Iran does, farmers and agricultural experts know it won’t be that simple.

Increased costs for energy and fertilizer are compounding a host of issues for farmers already running thin business margins.

There are tariffs on imported metals integral to the U.S. food production system. Farmers have been hit with reduced water runoff in California and bad weather conditions in Brazil. Food producers are grappling with small beef herds, pests and recovery from avian influenza.

“It is the most difficult period of financial stress that modern agriculture has faced since the 1980s farm crisis. And I don’t get pushback on that,” said John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union.

Hansen said the war’s economic fallout is part of a bigger picture in which farmers are beset by business problems stemming from Washington, from tariffs to DOGE cuts affecting the Department of Agriculture to the Senate’s delay in passing the 2026 farm bill.

The war has made things worse. The national average for gas prices punched in at $4.22 per gallon on Friday, compared to $3.14 one year ago, according to the American Automobile Association.

Wisconsin dairy farmer Linda Ceylor said she refilled the diesel tank that sits on her farm late last month for $4.45 per gallon, compared to $3.89 in October. That is on top of increased prices for her tractor repairs and cleaning supplies for the milk pipes.

“I’m going to spend at least a couple thousand more on this operation that I wasn’t planning to spend,” Ceylor said. “I, like most of America, did not know this war was coming.”

One of the most substantial impacts of the war will be increased transportation and processing costs during the harvest season in late summer and the fall, experts said.

Agricultural economist Ricky Volpe warned that those farm costs, as well as high fertilizer prices, threaten the “foundation to our food supply chain.” He pointed to row crops like corn, wheat and soy that go back into the food production system as animal feed or hit the market months later after being stored or converted to food staples such as cornstarch, sweetener or flour.

“Higher energy costs and higher fertilizer prices have already impacted the planting and the early stage of the growing process for all these commodities,” said Volpe, a professor at California Polytechnic State University.

“In my view, there’s no going back from that. It’s already baked in the cake, because there’s no way that growers can sort of offset or relieve themselves of these costs and these challenges that they’ve already dealt with,” Volpe added.

President Trump announced new actions to bring down the cost of farm equipment to support American farmers on the South Lawn on March 27. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

While many farmers likely purchased their fertilizer for the year before the war began, those who didn’t are in a tough position. Hansen said he works with producers who did not purchase materials or secure their loans by March 1 — the standard time to do so — and had to refinance. Those who were approved are eating into their loans to pay higher fertilizer and fuel prices.

“It’s a lot of money that you don’t have,” Hansen added.

The pressures are driving farmers in Nebraska to a crisis hotline Hansen’s organization helps run, he said. The hotline uses government-funded mental health vouchers in lieu of payment for one-hour counseling sessions.

“We had two years where we had the funding, where we distributed 8,200 vouchers one year, 8,400 vouchers the other year, and yet the level of stress that we’re seeing today is substantially higher than it was those years,” Hansen said.

Consumers are feeling the squeeze, too.

Experts agree that an end to the war would provide some price relief for Americans at the supermarket. LM Otero/AP

Food inflation was on the forecast for 2026 before President Donald Trump launched an attack on Iran. In February, the USDA Economic Research Service predicted 3.1% inflation for all food this year. The food inflation rate hit 3.2% in April, a half-percentage-point increase from the month prior.

“Many of the food price increases consumers are experiencing right now have primary explanations that predate the conflict entirely,” Kenneth Foster, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, wrote in an email to NOTUS. “The conflict adds to that baseline; it does not replace it.”

Foster estimates that a sustained conflict would add roughly 3 to 6 percentage points to food inflation numbers over the next year to year and a half, primarily burdening lower-income households that spend a significant portion of their income on food.

But Foster and Volpe agreed that an end to the war would provide some price relief at the supermarket.

Foster argued that the lag in price increases due to oil and supply constraints is “fundamentally different in scale and mechanism from the episodes that produced broad food-price crises in living memory,” like during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It is not the inflationary food crisis that the dramatic fertilizer and diesel headlines might imply, nor is it going to be rapid or certain,” Foster said.