There’s a line spoken by Harry Potter, the literary creation of author J.K. Rowling, in the film “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” that many in U.S. agriculture can relate to: “I don’t go looking for trouble,” the budding wizard notes, but “trouble usually finds me.”
Farmers and ranchers know just how he feels.
Take this winter’s weather. According to a recent post by Bryce Anderson, DTN’s meteorologist emeritus, data for the 2025/26 December-through-February “winter” shows it’s been the second warmest in 131 years and the “driest in 45 years, going back to the 1980/81 winter season.”
In fact, “A review of USDA’s March 3 drought report,” notes Anderson, shows that over the winter season, drought in corn country “grew from 30% (of the area) to 51%; soybean-area drought grew from 30% to 53%,” while “winter wheat drought grew from 35% to 56%.”
Warm and dry this early is both a bad combination and a bad omen. The key change to indicate any reversal, Anderson offers in a follow-up email, is “how quickly La Niña conditions in the Pacific moderate.”
La Niña often brings cold, dry winters; its sibling, El Niño, is associated with warmer, wetter winters.
“If the Pacific actually swings toward El Niño,” he continues, “that should be better for Midwest temperatures and moisture along with conditions in” California’s productive Central Valley.
Weather may be somewhat predictable; war never is and that’s again been shown by the still-young, still-expanding fight in the Middle East. It’s a costly, no-end-in-sight “trouble” that touches everything and everyone.
Its immediate effects — fast-climbing diesel costs and soaring fertilizer prices — are two more hard hits to already reeling farmers who, incidentally, are only beginning to collect $12 billion in federal “bridge” subsidies to mop up 2025 losses.
Now the war has pushed the president to delay his much-anticipated trip to China. It’s the right move; presidents should be on American soil in times of war, not swapping smiles with politicians in foreign capitals.
After the news became public, however, traders clipped old-crop soybean futures for 70 cents and corn for 13 cents. Their worries are real: Will the meeting be rescheduled soon, and if so, will ag trade still be at the center of talks or will it be oil and war?
Even more trouble awaits when attention turns to Washington. First is the 2025 Farm Bill, passed March 5 by the House Ag Committee. It was a hard pull. Debate “stretched more than 20 hours and featured sharp partisan disputes,” reported the Iowa Capital Dispatch, “particularly over previous cuts to nutrition programs.”
Those cuts, dropped into last July’s “big beautiful bill,” derailed the generations-old urban/farm coalition that had worked in tandem to pass every Farm Bill since the founding of Food Stamps, today’s SNAP.
The breakup, Scott Faber, a senior official with the Environmental Working Group, told the Dispatch, puts the Farm Bill in big trouble now. “Republicans chose to blow up… the coalition,” he explains, “so if Congress fails to pass another farm bill ever again, it will be Republicans who rightfully will bear the blame.”
And, he added, this “’historic once-in-a-generation miscalculation by the farm lobby… will, in the long run, undermine public support for the farm safety net.’”
His thesis may be tested soon. Congress was asked by 56 farm groups in mid-January to again throw farmers “a lifeline to keep their farms in business until (Farm Bill-based) support reaches them in late 2026.”
How much more? No amount was mentioned, but tens of billions is likely.
And that’s only if the weather, war-shaken markets, new tariffs and Congress don’t deliver even more trouble.
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Contact information is posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
