The cattle game has been good for Chris Lynch as of late. He and his wife began raising cattle in 2015 on their farm in California, MO. Their herd of 30 “mama cows” produces around 29 calves per year. This year, Lynch was able to purchase insurance that guarantees he’ll sell each calf for at least $2700 — a rate $1000 dollars more than just four years ago.
Lynch also works full-time as an agent at Gibson Insurance Group, selling commodity insurance across central Missouri to both crop and livestock farmers. Straddling both halves of the farm economy, Lynch has seen his fellow farmers in the crop markets struggle in recent years despite his own industry’s success.
“The cattle side of agriculture is definitely in the black right now,” Lynch said, while describing the crop farmers he interacts as “a lot more optimistic than you would think looking at the numbers.”
The numbers for the U.S. farm economy show a K-shaped economy: livestock farmers with cattle are seeing record returns as crop farmers struggle to break even. The USDA and other agricultural groups project that the two sectors will continue diverging over the next few years. Rising input costs are helping to drive the divergence, shrinking crop farmers’ profit margins. As a result, the sector is becoming increasingly reliant on government aid to stay afloat.
Between 2023 and 2024, farm receipts — the total gross income plus government assistance — for U.S. crop farmers decreased by 8.2%. Over that same period, livestock producers saw their receipts increase by 4.8% — a $13 billion gain compared to crop farming’s $30 billion loss. In February, the Trump administration opened enrollment in the Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) program, providing $11 billion in one-time payments for crop farmers to help offset tariffs. The outbreak of the Iran war only days later further raised input costs, placing the crop sector in even more dire straits and necessitating greater federal aid.
“That’s just kind of the nature of cost — once they go up, they’re hard to come down,” said Ben Brown, a senior research associate at the University of Missouri’s Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute (FAPRI). “They’re sticky.”
U.S. farming lives on boom-and-bust economic cycles driven by supply and demand. Farmers experience peak profitability when market inventory lessens and demand and commodity prices are at their highest. The valleys — when the market “busts” — occur when supply outpaces demand and sends prices downward. Crop and livestock cycles operate independently, with cattle cycles lasting roughly 8–12 years and crop cycles repeating every 4–6 years.
The U.S. livestock industry owes its current success to the cattle cycle peaking. The number cattle is the smallest it’s been since 1961, which has sent the price of beef skyrocketing. Between March 2023 and 2026, the average price of ground beef rose 39.2%. All the while, consumer demand for beef has remained surprisingly constant.
“We no longer look and make our decisions based on prices; we do that based on what we want,” said Brown. “That’s just a signal of a healthy economy and people not necessarily changing what they’re eating based on budgets.”
Livestock farmers ultimately need to replenish their herd to ensure healthy numbers, but certain external forces are prolonging the current high period cattle cycle. La Niña weather events in recent years brought drought to cattle-producing areas, with one estimate characterizing three-quarters of U.S. cattle as being in drought. The low rainfall reduces the available pastures cattle producers use to feed their herds, incentivizing them to keep their herds smaller in efforts to reduce the number of mouths to feed.
Moreover, the high price of cattle makes retaining cows a difficult cost-benefit decision.
“Those females that they would need to hold back to increase the number of cows, they’re awfully valuable right now,” said Kenny Burdine, an extension professor of livestock economics at the University of Kentucky. “The markets simply dictate that they go instead of being kept.”
The Trump administration planned to sign an executive order to temporarily reduce tariffs on imported beef to bring prices down, but delayed the signing. Derrell Peel, livestock economist at Oklahoma State University, stated in an interview with RFD TV the U.S. already imports a high amount of beef and that rebuilding the cattle herd remains the only suitable long-term option.
U.S. crop farmers find themselves in a valley of low prices. Nationally, crop prices have fallen and plateaued after peaking in 2022. While suppressing crop farmers’ overall farm receipts, rising input costs are erasing their already thin profit margins.
“We had net costs for row crop farmers increasing, even before the conflict began, for 2026,” said Bob Maltsbarger, a senior agricultural economist at FAPRI.
Volatile fertilizer prices have kneecapped crop farmers in the years leading up to the Iran war. Nitrogen fertilizer first spiked to all-time highs in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. After normalizing, the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran caused prices to veer sharply upward at the start of 2026, with nitrogen fertilizer up over 41% since early February. The average farm dedicates around 33-45% of its operating costs to it, and the high prices may affect next year’s crop season in 2027.
“Even if it ended today and crude goes down, because of damage to fertilizer plants in the Middle East, we’re going to see those fertilizer prices stay elevated,” said Maltsbarger.
Crop farmers are also dealing with the wider energy shocks caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Critical to powering farm machinery for large-scale farming, the price of diesel increased nationally by 40.5% since U.S. strikes began in late February.
Matt Hayes, owner and operator of Bounty of the Valley Farms in Salinas, California, has seen the local price of diesel rise from $4.50 to well over $7. He says filling up his diesel truck costs around $240, up from $140 previously. These sticky input costs make it more difficult for farmers to emerge from the valleys.
The economic circumstances have left a mental toll on U.S. farmers. In the April report for the Purdue Ag Economy Barometer surveying national farmer sentiment, 63% of respondents predicted good times in the next five years for livestock producers. Just 31% expressed the same enthusiasm for crop producers, the largest gap in the survey’s history.
To farmers like Chris Lynch, the highs and lows shouldn’t come as much surprise. It’s a reality of the job.
“It’s just a cyclical market,” said Lynch. “The livestock market will come down at some point, and at some point, the crop market will come back up.”
Boom and bust is just the way a farmer lives their life.