“Continued low prices, high production expenses and extreme weather is leading to more farm stress, including higher chapter 12 bankruptcies … The Ninth District’s farm economy might generously be described as struggling to tread water,” says a March 22, 2019, report in the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Banks’s recent issue of Fedgazette.

Ronald A. Wirtz, director of Regional Outreach for the Minneapolis Fed Bank and author of the report adds, “Farmers are also a victim…