According to the paper of record, farmers are being "clobbered financially." In reality, 2020 is going to be one of the most profitable years ever for American farmers. How did the New York Times get this so wrong? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/us/politics/trump-farmers-subsidies.html

These are common industry talking points but they're misleading (as any journalist who spent more than 5 minutes research the issue would have discovered). Yes, farm debt is at an all-time high, but so is farm wealth. That's what years of steady growth does.

Further, it's not true that farm bankruptcies have continued to rise. According to the farm bureau's own analysis, bankruptcies have substantially slowed during the pandemic.

Beyond that, Chapter 12 bankruptcies are NOT a good measure of farm financial stress. The terms of Chapter 12 bankruptcy are incredibly generous and many large-scale farmers use it to escape tax liability regardless of how well their farms are doing.

About 60% of farms filing Chapter 12 survive as businesses in comparison to about 15% of all firms filing Chapter 11.

More industry talking points uncritically repeated by a journalist.

There are two glaring problems with this analysis. First, 2010 was one of the most profitable years ever for American farmers (as 2020 will be too). Depending on how you calculate it, it was either in the top 10 or top 20 years in terms of profitability.

So the worst year since 2010 is probably going to be a pretty good year.

Second, cash receipts hasn't been an important indicator of net income for most farmers for almost a century. We've had robust counter-cyclical subsidy programs for commodities since 1933, meaning that when cash receipts go down, subsidies go up.

This isn't to say that some farms aren't struggling right now. But acting as if this a sector-wide problem when it's not obscures who's actually hurting and why.