Food producers are struggling to secure capital to support and grow their operations as the agricultural economy struggles amid market volatility, a panel of bank representatives shared during the 2026 World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco.
The U.S. ag economy started 2026 with more volatility and uncertainty, as the Iran war increased fertiliser prices and energy costs. U.S. corn growers were already planning the second most expensive crop on record, due to rising input costs, according to the National Corn Growers Association.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty in the industry. Commodity prices, particularly around corn and soybeans, have dropped pretty significantly over the last couple of years, so profits [were] squeezed fairly tight. Between crop insurance and some government assistance, we oversee a lot of customers hang in there, but the uncertainty in the industry is a bit greater than what we’ve seen in quite a while,” said Mark Jensen, president and CEO of Farm Credit Services of America.
Money is flowing in the agriculture sector, but capital “is more constrained than it’s been historically” at the producer-level, Jensen said. However, bankers are still finding opportunities in the farm economy but are lending cautiously, Jim Jones, chief credit officer at Agribank, explained.
“We still have a healthy, sustainable growth rate within certain elements of the farm credit system, but we have to be prudent in terms of how we allocate the capital,” Jones elaborated.
Can technology be a hedge against volatility?
Government payments, like Agriculture Risk Coverage, Price Loss Coverage, and ad-hoc programmes, “have helped a bit, but they do not cover the losses,” said Scott Iverson, managing director of food and agribusiness at Wells Fargo. Nearly half (47.4%) of farmers are planning to use one-time bridge payments to pay down debt, according to Purdue University and CME Group Ag Economy Barometer for Feb. 2026
Food producers are diversifying their operations to survive the current moment, finding new revenue streams, and using management tools to more effectively manage their increasingly complex operations, Jensen explained.
“The customers that have adopted technology find ways to find new efficiencies within their operation. Those that really adopt some of the best and most advanced risk management practices ... continue to evolve and change the industry quite a bit,” Jensen elaborated.
Given the state of the ag economy, agtech companies must alleviate the financial risk of farmers adopting new technologies by partnering and de-risking the capital needed for technology, Iverson said.
Managing risk might mean managing loans, leases
A part of managing risk and volatility is understanding the best financial instruments for a farm, explained Brenda Frank, chief transformation officer at Cobank.
“In some cases, using a lease instead of a loan might be a way of managing risk. Having a knowledge of the ability to do interest rate swaps, utilizing the kinds of money movement and risk management that is available from different money movement systems, I think those are all parts of the financial services that people need to be thoughtful about, and that we need to continue to develop and be in front of in the industry, so that there’s not a gap in any kind of risk management that’s available at the farm or in rural communities that might be available to other types of businesses,” Frank elaborated.
