$6.53 a gallon! That’s this week’s national average price of diesel according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — up more than two and a half dollars from a year ago. If that number alone doesn’t startle you, it should. Diesel is not a line-item farmers can shop around or defer. It runs the tractor, the combine, and the grain truck, and there is no version of growing wheat that doesn’t require diesel.
And diesel is not the only farm cost creating headlines. Fertilizer costs on core inputs like anhydrous ammonia and urea remain more than double what they were just a few years ago. Farm operating loan interest rates have climbed back near their highest levels since the 2007 financial crisis. Add it up — fuel, fertilizer, seed, equipment, credit, everything in between — and USDA-tracked farm production expenses are now running roughly 44 percent higher than 2018. That is not a rough patch. That’s a structural cost crisis, and it’s been building for years while Washington’s response has not kept pace.
Which brings me to 2018. That’s the year the last farm bill was signed into law — itself built on economic data that predates that law. Every wheat grower reading this has a fuel receipt and a fertilizer invoice from 2018 sitting somewhere in a filing cabinet, inbox, or shoebox. I’d encourage growers to find them, put them next to this month’s receipts, and show them both to your Senators and Congressional Representatives. Black and white numbers on a page do something a talking point never will: they make the farm cost crisis undeniable.
But showing up with receipts only matters if it leads to action. It’s simply not enough for Members of Congress to say they hear us. We’ve heard “we hear you” for years while costs kept climbing and the farm bill kept slipping. Farmers need Congress to set aside partisan finger-pointing and act — on the diesel and fertilizer costs eating farm income alive, and on the forces driving them. That means: 1.) finishing a long-overdue farm bill, 2.) appropriating supplemental assistance for farmers who’ve been losing money on their crop because of stubbornly high input costs beyond our control, 3.) exercising real authority to ease the geopolitical tensions pushing fuel prices to records, 4.) tempering the impact of trade fights we didn’t start, and 5.) building a business environment predictable enough that a grower can plan a crop rotation, not just survive one. That’s not a partisan ask. It’s the job.
Here is the opening in front of us: with an election seven weeks away, elected officials and candidates at every level of government are more available right now than they will be for a long time. Use it. Sit down with them at a town hall, a candidate coffee, a county fair booth, and be honest about what this cost crisis looks like on your farm. Do it plainly, not angrily — but do it, because officials should no longer be able to point to Washington gridlock if the demand for action is loud and specific enough.
Farmer frustration over the cost of doing business is not partisan. It is not political. It is American. The last clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That’s beautiful 18th-century language meaning U.S. citizens have the right to tell government officials how we ought to be governed, and to convey when action is necessary.
Every family who grows food and fiber deserves a Congress willing to act. And Members of Congress can only fully understand the gravity of the current situation if we peacefully, respectfully, but directly convey our economic reality and the need for bipartisan action to address the 2026 farm cost crisis.