Farm Bankruptcies Hit a Six-Year High While Nobody Was Watching

Hey folks, the farm bankruptcy numbers came out this week and they aren't pretty. April logged 62 Chapter 12 filings nationally, the worst single-month total since early 2020. On top of that, rural hospital administrators have been doing the math on what the Medicaid cuts actually mean for their communities, and the answer keeps coming back the same way. We've got all of it, plus Tork's full market breakdown, Sawyer with something personal on the mental side of pushing hard, and the SpaceX IPO story that everybody in rural America should be paying attention to right now.

Farm Bankruptcies Hit a Six-Year High and the Story Barely Made a Sound

April 2026 produced 62 Chapter 12 farm bankruptcy filings nationally, the highest single-month total since February 2020. That is a 130% jump from April 2025. Year-to-date, 158 farms have filed. Minnesota led the first quarter of the year with 8 filings, double its total for all of 2024. Observers in the agriculture press are already drawing comparisons to the 1980s farm crisis, and given the trajectory, that comparison is no longer far-fetched.

The pressure isn't coming from one place. Net farm income has been declining. Input costs, particularly nitrogen fertilizer, have spiked as global supply disruptions affect major production regions. Commodity prices haven't recovered to levels that make the math work for many operations. And the Farm Credit System's non-performing loans have more than doubled since 2023, a sign that what looked like manageable restructuring two years ago is now surfacing as actual defaults. Farmers who were refinancing operating losses against land equity had a runway as long as land values held. That runway is getting shorter.

The comparison to the 1980s is worth making but worth caveating. There are far fewer farms today than there were then, so the raw filing numbers will never look the same as the crisis that wiped out a generation of family farms. But that's not necessarily a comfort. Today's operations are bigger and more leveraged. When a large modern grain operation fails, the downstream damage to lenders, input suppliers, and co-ops can be proportionally enormous. The farms with a path through this look a lot alike: paid-for equipment, no rent premium, low overhead, and enough cash on the sideline to outlast the operators around them.

The $50 Billion Rural Health Fund Sounds Like a Lot Until You Do the Math

The One Big Beautiful Bill cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade and added a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program. Rural hospital administrators across the country have been doing the math on that trade, and the answer keeps coming out the same way: the fund doesn't come close to offsetting what's being taken away. More than 417 rural hospitals are currently at risk of closure, and more than 40% of rural facilities are already operating at a net loss before the Medicaid cuts take effect.

Independent rural hospitals are projected to lose $465 million in Medicaid revenue this year alone, averaging over $630,000 per hospital. Over a decade, the projected losses run into the hundreds of billions. The $50 billion transformation fund comes with a critical restriction: states can use only up to 15% of it for direct patient care. The rest must go to broader system transformation, which in practice means administrative programs that don't keep hospital beds open or emergency room doors operating.

A rural hospital isn't just a building where sick people go. It's the reason a doctor chooses to live in a small town. It's the reason a pharmacist stays. It's the reason a young family looks at a community and decides it has enough infrastructure to put down roots. When a hospital closes in a rural community, everything connected to it starts to follow. The loss doesn't announce itself all at once. It shows up slowly, over years, as the town gets a little thinner every time something else moves away.

Tork's Market Update What the numbers mean for you

This Week's Numbers

This isn't financial advice. I'm just a farmer with an opinion.

Sawyer's Spotlight The younger generation's take, straight from the barn

Every once in a while I'll talk about something that has nothing to do with markets or strategy, and this is one of those weeks. If you're somebody who is wired to always be improving, always reading, always pushing, always thinking about the next move, I want to talk to you directly about the trap that lives inside that mindset.

The problem isn't the drive. The problem is that the target moves every time you close the distance on it. You're always measuring the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and if you never stop running, the gap just gets bigger regardless of how much you close. I spent a stretch of time where I was genuinely miserable despite building things that, on paper, should have felt like real progress. The drive that was supposed to be the engine had become the leak.

What's actually helped me is building real counterweights. Not slowing down; that is not the goal and it would not stick anyway. But giving myself things that get me completely out of my own head. Reading something that isn't a self-help book. Sitting outside with no phone and no earbuds, just being present in whatever's in front of you. Writing in a journal, not to solve anything, just to empty the mental loop onto paper. And for me personally, praying. Actually surrendering the outcome to something bigger than my own plan for it.

The part that surprised me: the periods when I've done my best work and been most useful to the people around me are when I'm grounded, not when I'm running at full throttle. The grounding isn't wasted time. It's what makes the time you're actually moving count for something. Figure out what grounds you, whether it's sitting in the shop, getting in the woods, or bow hunting, and protect that time like it's productive. Because it is.

If this hit close to home, hit reply. I mean it. I read every one.

4 Things That Caught Our Eye This Week

Things are tight out there for a lot of people in this business right now, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But every single person who has walked into that barn over the past year has had one thing in common: they found a way when the circumstances didn't make it easy. That's the American farmer. That's what this show is about.

We'll see you in the barn.

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