Why Should Delaware Care?
Crop farmers make up a sizable portion of Delaware’s farming population and provide key corn and soybean products to the state’s poultry industry. Despite some recent stop-gap federal funding, higher input costs and lower prices have put a strain on Delaware farmers’ financial situation, making the future of their industry uncertain.
Jim Minner has a thinking chair.
It sits in the maintenance shed behind his house, facing the Felton-area grain farmer’s tractors and combines.
In the winter months, when Minner is not planting or harvesting crops, he spends most of his time in that chair deliberating how he might be able to improve his machinery for the upcoming season.
Over the past few years though, with corn and soybean prices dropping and costs for fertilizer and machinery rising, Minner has adopted a mindset of “just get by,” in order to make ends meet on the farm.
This, he said, means keeping expenses like equipment, fertilizer and seeds as low as possible. It also means foregoing any major machinery upgrades.
“The trick is to keep your costs low, keep your overhead low,” Minner, president of the Kent County Farm Bureau, told Spotlight Delaware. “That helps in the bad years.”
And Minner is not the only farmer facing ongoing economic challenges.
In response to “temporary trade market disruptions and increased production costs,” the federal government recently rolled out $11 billion in one-time assistance payments for farmers around the country based on how many acres of “commodity crops” — or mass-produced crops like corn, soybeans, wheat and rice — they grow.
The unforeseen federal funding, Minner said, allowed him to purchase roughly $10,000 in updated parts for his tractors and combines. Upgrades he had been putting off in recent years due to the tight margins.
As a result, Minner has been able to get out of his thinking chair this winter, instead doing some hands-on mechanic work to his 30-plus-year-old equipment this month.
Other Delaware farmers say they are using the one-time payments – which began being distributed through local Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices in late February and will continue through mid-April – toward seed costs for the upcoming season or other expenses from last year that were particularly tight.
“I have to put it toward my bills in order to keep myself afloat,” Dover-area farmer Paul Cartanza Sr. said.
While experts say the current farming landscape is somewhat better on the Delmarva Peninsula than elsewhere because farmers have a guaranteed market for their corn and soybeans in the poultry industry, panelists at an agriculture summit in Harrington in mid-February likened the current crop economy to the Great Depression.
Farmers and agricultural economists have differing opinions as to whether higher operating costs, dropping prices from overproduction, the loss of an export market due to tariffs on China, or a combination of the three, is causing tight profit margins for American farmers.
They agree, though, that the current farm assistance funding is just a stopgap measure in an industry that is increasingly strained and whose future is uncertain.
“We see this as a bailout, and it’s not the way we want to operate,” Georgetown-area farmer Jay Baxter said. “We would rather see our bottom line increase and us be able to do business off of our profit and loss.”
High yields, low prices
Despite what Delaware farmers described as a good-weather, high-yield crop year, dropping prices are leaving the state’s industry stretched at the seams.
The agricultural community spent much of this past fall debating what impact President Donald Trump’s tariff war would have on the American soybean industry.
As of late September 2025, China, the world’s top purchaser of soybeans, had dropped from purchasing $12.6 billion worth of American soybeans in 2024 to $0.
Corn and soybean prices have been dropping for a couple of years, but many farmers have been watching the prices particularly closely since Trump first implemented his tariff policy in January 2025.
Adding to the timeline of uncertainty, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s tariff policy was unconstitutional late last month, and Trump has responded with new, often fluctuating, tariff rates.
The average nationwide price per bushel of soybeans has been creeping down in recent years, from $14.20 three years ago to a projected price of $10.20 this season, James McDonald, an agricultural economics researcher at the University of Maryland, told Spotlight Delaware. Corn prices per bushel have followed a similar trend, he said, dropping from $6.54 in the 2022-23 season to $4.10 presently.
The exact prices vary slightly per region, and Delaware farmers say they tend to get above average prices for corn, and slightly below average prices for soybeans.
Poultry companies, like Mountaire and Perdue, who have become large operations in the southern Delaware agriculture scene, tend to demand more corn than soybeans for their chickens, but the chicken farms provide a market to Delaware farmers for both crops.
Baxter, the Georgetown-area farmer, said his corn operation has historically been able to make “good money” at $5 a bushel, so the average pricing isn’t too far off. Soybean rates, he said, have a larger gap.
At the same time, the 2025 harvest was what many farm groups call a “bumper harvest,” meaning a substantially higher production season than usual.
Dave Marvel, a Harrington-based farmer who grows corn, soybeans and watermelon, said his crop yields were good this past season, but the end economic result was a “wash” due to the lower prices.
“Yields were favorable, but the pricing has been down,” said Marvel, who is the vice president of the Kent County Farm Bureau.
Minner said similarly that he had one of his best crop yield years in a long time, but prices were “so terrible,” that the pay off was not very good.
Many Delaware farmers say they see Trump’s tariff policies as one factor in the lower price outlook for their crops, but not the sole contributor to the price drop.
Baxter, a self-described eternal optimist, said he believes the tariffs will create long-term benefits because they will eventually readjust the supply and demand of the market in favor of American farmers.
“We just have to be patient and wait it out,” he said.
Nate Bruce, an agricultural researcher at the University of Delaware, said he sees a shift toward more soybean crushing facilities being built in the U.S., instead of needing to be exported to crushing facilities in China. This, he said, could eliminate the United States’ reliance on global soybean markets by the early 2030s.
But McDonald, the University of Maryland researcher, strongly disagreed.
He said American consumers are not going to miraculously start demanding more soybeans over the next few decades, so farmers will need to find new global markets in order to sustain the industry.
Input costs creep up
When asked why they believe profit margins have been so tight in recent years, many Delaware farmers cited rising operating costs on items such as fertilizer, seeds and machinery as the decisive factor.
Minner said he uses potash, a fertilizer made from potassium, in his soil. A lot of potash is imported from Canada, but higher tariffs on the country have made it more expensive to bring in the ingredient, he said.
He has been forced to get creative and find other sources of manure, or rely on the potash he already has in the soil, in order to avoid the extra costs.
“We’re going to cut back on inputs,” Minner said. “We’re going to grow the same crops, we’re just going to feed them differently,”
Marvel, the Harrington-area farmer, said he ideally likes to invest in some fungicides to make the plants healthier and increase his production, but it is difficult to afford that currently.
At the same time, Marvel is working with old machinery – a combine from the 1970s and his newest tractor from the 1990s — which he said he wants to upgrade to make production more efficient.
“All that kind of technology costs a lot of money, and there’s not enough to invest in that kind of technology,” he said.
Exacerbating the situation even more recently, McDonald said, is the conflict in the Middle East. It has caused fertilizer prices to jump by another 15% in the past week. A number of countries in the Middle East are large exporters of natural gas, which is a key ingredient in fertilizer.
Looking forward
Delaware farmers agree the federal government has recognized the squeeze facing their industry, as shown by the current rollout of federal assistance funds and other forthcoming programs.
Still, farmers say they feel uncertain about how they will continue to get by on such tight profit margins, and when an upward trend may hit the markets.
“They have been very proactive for agriculture,” Marvel said about the federal government. “We’re just happy that the money came, and it’s going to be a very quick turnaround.”
Between the one-time assistance payments and other funding programs, like specialty crop money, McDonald said the federal government will be providing $44 billion in direct government payments to farmers this year.
While the massive funding amount shows the degree of distress American farmers are currently experiencing, McDonald said, he is also concerned the government is stepping in for the market too much.
“We’re assuring people that you should continue to plant corn and soybeans, even when you know we’re not really making money on corn and soybeans,” he said.
When asked about their strategy moving forward – amid the low prices and high operating costs – Delaware farmers did not have a concrete answer.
Minner and Cartanza both said they will continue trying to “forward contract” some of their crops, or agree to sell them for a set price before the crops have even been planted, in an attempt to lock in the best prices possible.
Baxter has diversified his operation to some other crops, including vegetables, chickens and greenhouses, which he said helps somewhat with the uncertainty.
He added he will not lose his faith that there is a “brighter day ahead” for American farmers.
Until then, Baxter said, he will keep “sharpening his pencil,” and seeing where he might be able to cut costs.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.