BARN TALK
The Unfiltered Voice of Rural America
Issue #026 · September 23, 2026
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Hey folks, the Senate finally moved a farm bill, with seven days left on the extension holding the thing together. That same week, two Wisconsin towns found out 144 jobs are leaving. One gets covered for months. The other gets a paragraph in the local paper.
In this issue
| A farm bill cleared committee 12 to 11 on party lines, with the extension dying September 30 |
| Two plants, 144 jobs and two Wisconsin towns learning what a closure costs |
| Cattle and hogs both broke in the same week, while crude would not drop under a hundred |
| August feedlot placements the lowest on record for the month since 1996 |
| A dead truck in a fence row that paid for a roof on somebody else's corn crib |
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This Week's Episode
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A Farm Bill Moved With Seven Days Left On The Clock
The 2018 farm bill is in its third year on an extension. That extension dies September 30.
The Senate Agriculture Committee voted 12 to 11 on September 16 to send the Agricultural Act of 2026 to the floor. Party lines, no amendments, not a word changed from the version that died in that room on August 6. What moved it was attendance. McConnell and Tuberville were in their chairs this time, and a proxy vote does not count.
What is actually holding it up
Food stamps. Not reference prices, not crop insurance, not conservation. The fight is over how long states get before they cover part of the SNAP tab. Democrats wanted two years, Republicans offered one, and that gap is why a bill both parties call urgent moved on the narrowest vote available. The House passed its own version April 30, so the two still have to be reconciled.
Seven days is not much runway
It has run on extensions since 2023. John Hoeven put it plainly: “Our farmers and ranchers need help now. It's past time.” If the vote slips, the likely outcome is a fourth extension, and one more year of planning against a safety net written for a different price of corn.
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From the Barn
Three years of extensions stopped being gridlock a while ago. Every year the old bill gets stretched is another year nobody takes a recorded vote on reference prices that never kept up with the cost of a crop. You are farming a 2018 safety net at 2026 input costs, and that gap will not close while the argument is about food stamps.
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Two Plants Closed And Two Wisconsin Towns Ran The Numbers
Inside one week, two central Wisconsin towns learned 144 jobs are leaving. One of the two companies explained itself. The other did not.
Foremost Farms pointed at the dairy market, and at the fact this country built more cheese capacity than it has demand to fill. CEO Brenda Dehart said the decision came down solely to changing market conditions. Samuel Pressure Vessel said nothing.
By the numbers
| 76 jobs at Samuel Pressure Vessel in Tomahawk, gone by January 1. |
| 68 jobs at the Foremost Farms cheese plant in Marshfield, gone in December. |
| 3.8 percent unemployment in Lincoln County in July, against 3.3 percent statewide. A low number helps little when the employer is the one leaving. |
Low unemployment is not the same as options
Mayor Michael Habeck said what every mayor here says: “We don't want to lose any families.” Economist Steven Deller named the harder part: manufacturing has not been a growth industry nationally in a long time. A town at 3.8 percent unemployment with one big plant has no slack in it.
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From the Barn
Nobody is holding a hearing over 144 jobs in Lincoln and Wood counties. A few families list their houses, the school drops a couple of sections, and the guy who owns the bar starts watching Tuesday nights. That is how a town goes, and you have watched it inside twenty miles of home.
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This week's numbers
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Corn (Dec '26)
$5.27 1/2 /bu
▼ $0.02 3/4 on the week
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Soybeans (Nov '26)
$13.03 1/2 /bu
▲ $0.07 on the week
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Chicago Wheat (Dec '26)
$7.14 1/4 /bu
▼ $0.11 on the week
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Live Cattle (Oct '26)
$215.92 /cwt
▼ $3.75 on the week
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Lean Hogs (Oct '26)
$78.10 /cwt
▼ $3.42 on the week
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Crude Oil (Oct '26)
$100.30 /bbl
▲ $0.25 on the week
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Tork's Picks
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Bitcoin
$77,980 USD
▲ $314 on the week
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Deere (DE)
$683.99 /share
▲ $8.25 on the week
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This isn't financial advice. I'm just a farmer with an opinion.
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Tork's Take
What I would look at is both livestock contracts breaking in the same week while crude stayed over a hundred dollars. If you have cattle to sell this fall, the easy part of the rally is behind you. Deere closed up eight bucks in a week when nearly everything a farmer sells went the other way. That tells you who gets paid first.
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There is a truck in an Iowa fence row with a tree growing up through the bed. Somebody parked it thirty years ago meaning to get back to it. Kevin Brown goes and gets it, puts it together with whatever is in the toolbox, and drives it a hundred miles home to prove it runs. He does that on a channel called Junkyard Digs, and 1.3 million people subscribe.
Where it started is the part I keep chewing on. He built the channel off a cot in Kuwait, on government internet, through a deployment where his unit's job got contracted out and they spent the year sweeping hangars. He came home with 130,000 subscribers and two paychecks.
“Around here we leave the keys in the truck, because if somebody is desperate enough to need it, they'll at least be nice enough to fill it up before they put it back.” |
He is protective of Iowa in a way that comes out sideways. Ask whether people should move there and he says it is the worst place in the country and everybody should stay away. Two minutes later he is describing a burger in town after a day in the field, corn still green, saying that would be hard to leave. He is not selling anybody. He just never found a reason to go.
What he did with the audience is worth stealing. A farmer he knows had a hundred-year-old corn crib with a rotting roof and an $18,000 quote he was never spending on an uninsured building. Brown made a shirt, sold 800 in three weeks, and covered two roofs. He will not lean on those people for himself.
If there's a building on your place you keep meaning to save, hit reply and tell me about it. I read every one.
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Four things that caught our eye
| 01 |
USDA pulled the checkoff money off ESGAg Secretary Brooke Rollins told the National Dairy Board on September 17 that checkoff dollars can no longer fund anything built around ESG frameworks, net-zero, or climate neutrality. A separate memo pushed the same order to all 21 checkoff programs. Checkoff money is mandatory, which is why dairy farmers sued over where it went. |
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| 02 |
Mississippi handed out $104 million in rural health moneyGovernor Tate Reeves announced 167 awards on September 15 worth just over $104 million, out of a $205.9 million first-year budget. Roughly $47 million goes to technology and $43 million to care gaps like maternal and behavioral health. From the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation fund. Five years of money against thirty years of closures is a start, not a fix. |
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| 03 |
August feedlot placements were the lowest on record for the monthUSDA's Cattle on Feed report landed September 18 with 11.16 million head on feed September 1, up 1 percent. The number underneath matters more: August placements hit 1.62 million head, down 9 percent, the lowest August since the series began in 1996. Feeders are not there to place, so cattle are being fed longer. |
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| 04 |
Rural districts are running out of kids to fill the buildingsNational K-12 enrollment slid from roughly 50.8 million to 49.4 million between 2019 and 2024. Stateline reported September 15 that districts from Austin to Cleveland are closing or combining schools, and Minnesota's Iron Range is talking about it too. When two rural districts combine, the budget math works and the identity does not. |
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Barn Talk Trivia
Think you know your stuff?
Grain trades by the bushel, but at the elevator a bushel is a weight, not a volume. How many pounds is a bushel of corn?
| A. 48 pounds |
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B. 56 pounds |
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| C. 60 pounds |
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D. 64 pounds |
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Did You Know?
When hybrid corn showed up in the 1930s, farmers were planting about 8,000 plants per acre. Iowa fields today commonly run 32,000 to 34,000. The ears never got bigger. Breeders just built a plant that tolerates its neighbors that close.
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Word of the Week
| LINEMAN |
The trade that keeps your power on. A lineman works energized distribution and transmission line, out of a bucket or on hooks, often covering a few hundred square miles alone. The apprenticeship runs three to four years and the job sits near the top of every list of deadliest work in America. |
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The farm bill will probably get one more extension and you will read one paragraph about it somewhere. The 144 jobs in Tomahawk and Marshfield will not get a paragraph outside Wisconsin. Both are the same story about who gets noticed, and we would rather run both.
We'll see you in the barn.
Sawyer & Tork
Hosts, Barn Talk · joinbarntalk.com
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Read online · © 2026 Barn Talk · joinbarntalk.com · This week's episode: #EP218
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