On Chad Ingels’ northeast Iowa farm, every pass across the field is under the microscope as he fights to keep tight margins from slipping into the red.
“Oh, it’s tough,” Ingels said during an AgriTalk Farmer Forum discussion on Wednesday. “I think we’re going to have to really look at in-season passes that we planned to do. Maybe we’ll have to cut back one or two of those.”
Ingels, who splits his time between the farm and the Iowa Statehouse in Des Moines, says he can’t afford to simply slash expenses without weighing the risk to corn and soybean performance.
“You don’t want to impact yield,” he says. “You really want to take a look at what your return on investment is going to be on those passes.”
Across the Midwest, farmers like Ingels and Wisconsin grower and United Soybean Board director Tony Mellenthin are grappling with what they both describe as an “input price problem.” Corn and soybean prices have improved modestly from their lows, but fertilizer, pesticides and other inputs remain stubbornly high.
“I don’t think we necessarily have a corn or soybean price problem,” Mellenthin told AgriTalk Host Chip Flory. “We really have an input price problem, and until that can kind of get that addressed and fixed, that’s what I’m more concerned about than the price of corn and beans.”
Squeezing More From Every Dollar
On Ingels’ operation, the immediate response to high input costs is a sharper pencil and a more disciplined marketing plan.
In the field, that means reassessing every in-season trip across the crop. He’s eyeballing fertilizer or crop protection passes that might have been routine in good years, but now must clear a stricter bar: Will they pay?
On the balance sheet, Ingels says the focus turns to risk management and pricing discipline.
“Then it’s going to get to the marketing side,” he says. “We need to really do a better job of marketing corn and beans and — if we get a price run up — protect that run up so we can take advantage of it.”
The livestock side of the farm, he adds, is helping stabilize the operation, though it’s no windfall.
“The hog side is better than the crop side, but it’s not anywhere near like the beef side has been,” Ingels explains.
His hogs are sold into a specialty market through Niman Ranch, which ties its base price to grain and input costs.
“They’re setting a good base for us based on the corn and bean prices and our input costs,” Ingels says. “As we look out in the futures, the commercial price last year got higher than our base price, and so they adjusted our contract to say, ‘Hey, you’re going to get the better of the base price or the increased commercial price if the commercial price is higher.’”
That kind of contract flexibility, Ingels suggests, is one way the broader ag industry can help farmers weather volatile cost structures.
‘Not A Whole Lot Left To Do’
In western Wisconsin, Mellenthin says most of the fat has already been trimmed from farm budgets.
“If you’re still farming today, you’ve already done most of it, so there’s not a whole lot left to do,” he says. “There’s a little bit of tweaking to do, but I wouldn’t say there’s really any cuts to do.”
Instead of dramatic reductions, Mellenthin is stretching out capital decisions and switching to lower-cost inputs. That includes extending machinery trade cycles to delay big-ticket purchases and substituting generic fungicides for name-brand products when performance is comparable.
On the fertility side for corn, Mellenthin’s farm has been managing its nitrogen use through smaller, more targeted applications.
“We’ve been doing that for over a decade now,” he says. “There’s some of our ground that gets four passes of nitrogen.”
Recently, he’s begun to lean into alternative nitrogen sources to reduce dependence on high-priced synthetics. He points to biological products as one example.
“We have started utilizing some Pivot Bio,” he notes. “We haven’t seen a yield reduction, while at the same time reducing synthetic nitrogen, but we haven’t seen a yield gain, either. So I think we’re able to maintain there. And this year, that was the cheapest form of nitrogen a guy could buy.”
Policy and Industry: What Farmers Want Next
While individually they work to control what they can, both Ingels and Mellenthin are looking upstream — to input suppliers, processors and policymakers — to tackle what they can’t fix alone.
Regarding policy, Ingels points to the impact of global conflict and trade policy on fertilizer costs.
“There’s still some concerns out there with the war and how that’s impacted fertilizer prices going forward,” he notes. He adds that the greatest worry may lie beyond the current season to 2027, as farmers consider the next round of purchases.
During the discussion, Flory referenced efforts by the National Corn Growers Association and other ag organizations to push the administration to remove countervailing duties on phosphate imports from Morocco — one example of how farm groups are trying to pull down input prices through policy changes.
Ingels says those kinds of structural issues in fertilizer pricing could ultimately have more impact on future acreage decisions than anything farmers can do on their own fields this spring.
Demand, Renewable Fuels and Market Signals
Both farmers also stressed the importance of growing demand for the crops they produce, to help offset stubbornly high costs.
From his seat in the Iowa House, Ingels is backing measures aimed at strengthening markets for corn and soybeans, including renewable fuels. He references the Iowa Farm Act, saying it would increase the cap on the renewable fuels infrastructure fund grants to retailers from $100,000 to $150,000, and also help finance upgrades so more stations can offer E15 and higher ethanol blends.
“Retailers are taking advantage of that,” Ingels says “A few years ago, we had an E15 bill that went through… It certainly incentivized that all retailers handle E15 over time. And so this fund is being utilized all the time, and we’re trying to get to those last bit of retailers that maybe their costs are higher.”
At the federal level, though, Ingels is frustrated with delays on year-round E15 approval.
“This is the most frustrating thing I think the federal government has done to us,” he says. “They just keep kicking this down the road. We need to get it done.”
For soybean growers, Mellenthin is looking for similarly clear, long-term signals on low-carbon fuels.
In Wisconsin, he notes, lawmakers and the governor have already taken a supportive step by promoting “soy-based firefighting foam” to replace PFAS-based products. Nationally, Mellenthin wants to see the same kind of certainty for biomass-based diesel and other soy-driven fuels.
“We’ll take the good news when we can get it,” Mellenthin says of recent positive developments for biomass-based diesel. “Hopefully that could give a little certainty so infrastructure and investments can maintain being used.”
