INSIGHT-The US corn crop could be the biggest ever. That’s terrible news for America’s farmers.​

By P.J. Huffstutter

FREDERICKSBURG, Iowa Oct 25 (Reuters) - Kyle Wendland stepped away from his engineering degree two decades ago to follow his father - not just into farming corn, but into a world of debt, grit, and stubborn faith he could wrest a living from Iowa's soil.

He calls his place Comeback Farms, after his family nearly lost the land in the 1980s farm crisis.

This summer, with bills mounting and a farm economy in recession, he led a team through the sweltering Midwest, scouting fields and sizing up what President Donald Trump's administration said would be the biggest corn crop in U.S. history - a bounty that's helped keep prices at multi-year lows.

Measuring ears of corn by hand may seem a relic in an age of satellites and artificial intelligence. Yet the annual survey by the Pro Farmer Crop Tour felt like a rural quest for signs that Washington was now wrong — that disease or something unseen would result in a lower forecast.

As Trump fired government statisticians, farmers and traders have questioned whether the quality of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, long a market backbone, would hold up, heightening interest in the crop tour. More than 15,000 USDA employees , or about 15% of its workforce, have taken financial incentives to leave the agency under Trump’s downsizing mandate.

USDA temporarily removed some climate data from its websites, delayed a key trade report and deleted language tying Trump’s tariffs to a widening trade deficit. Agency staff shuttered research, and were obliged to correct export sales notices. It was a portent of more to come, with the federal government shutdown freezing the majority of USDA data or forcing it offline.

A USDA spokesperson told Reuters the workforce reductions prior to the government shutdown had "not had an impact on the Department’s ability to deliver timely, accurate, and useful data in service to American agriculture." USDA also said that it is reviewing all non-statutory surveys and reports "to ensure wise use of taxpayer dollars, improve efficiency, and eliminate unnecessary burdens."

The White House directed questions about USDA reports and accuracy of its data to the agency.

In the heat of summer, Wendland's mind turned to walking fields and seeing for himself how the Corn Belt’s crop was holding up. If conditions were good, it would mean big yields, low prices and farmers facing a third straight year of losses. Wendland's own farm was crowded with corn worth less than it cost him to grow.

If crop conditions had worsened since the USDA forecast though, tighter supplies could push prices higher.

"People are looking for hope out here," he said.

WITH FEW OPTIONS, FARMERS BET ON CORN

Farm debt is set to hit a record high this year as global grain flows shift, deepening the downturn in an industry battered by trade policies set in motion under Trump, largely maintained under Democratic president Joe Biden, and broadened in Trump's second term.

China, usually the top buyer of U.S. soybeans, hasn’t purchased a bushel from this year's crop. Last year, it bought 45% of U.S. soybean exports.

Anticipating trouble, many farmers planted more corn. They bet exports to Mexico and Canada, ethanol production and livestock feed would keep prices afloat.

Instead, the season stayed mild. Fields flourished. Prices drifted lower. Farmers' age-old fix - to boost yields and grow their way out of the problem - was no fix at all when the fields were this full and their bills so big.

Iowa corn farmers who rent land - a common practice - need $4.58 a bushel this year to break even, according to Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. In August, the average cash price: $3.89.

Wall Street and rural America have long tracked the Pro Farmer Crop Tour. The boots-on-the-ground survey of more than 1,600 corn and soybean fields is conducted by farmers, traders, brokers and government researchers, and timed to when corn reveals its fate. In July, the plants typically pollinate, setting the crop's potential; by August, that promise either fills out or fails.

The tour's hand-written counts helped fill gaps in government data, too. USDA stopped collecting corn and soybean samples for its August crop production report after an agency audit during Trump's first term. These days, the agency leans on satellites and farmer surveys, done in late July and early August. Just 14,900 farmers took part this year, nearly 27% fewer than the 20,300 producers surveyed in 2020.

On August 12, USDA predicted the largest corn crop since 1866: 16.7 billion bushels, enough corn to fill every barn, bin, and crib in America and still feed the nation’s livestock for half a year. Corn prices dropped.

On social media, farmers insisted USDA had missed woes all too glaring in their backyards - plants with tassels wrapped too tight, hail and wind battering fields.

Five days later, Wendland and his fellow crop scouts - more than 50 farmers, grain brokers and commodity traders - rolled into Dublin, Ohio, in a caravan of pickups loaded with beer. Another group pulled into South Dakota. Several USDA staff joined the tour, eager to check field conditions too.

Scouts like Wendland - on his 18th tour - said they believed USDA's forecasts because they knew the people behind them. They'd tromped fields together, traded stories over drinks in parking lots.

Still, nature always changes, they said. What's right one week can be wrong the next.

STOP EVERY 13 MILES

Launched by the Illinois Farm Bureau in the 1970s to gauge crop health, the tour expanded under news and marketing firm Pro Farmer to Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and Nebraska.

In Ohio, in a hotel meeting room, former Wall Street trader Peter Meyer outlined the rules: stop every 13 miles, sample and measure 30 feet of corn, count soybean pods longer than a quarter-inch. Randomness was the point - hundreds of imperfect samples stitched into a number that was a snapshot, not a guarantee.

Outside the tour, online anger spilled into real life. The chief commodities economist from StoneX Group, a financial services firm, was bombarded with online threats after the company pegged the U.S. corn crop at 16.334 billion bushels on Aug. 4.

Some anger is rooted in fear. Farm debt is expected to hit nearly $600 billion this year, a record. As credit conditions deteriorate, risk-wary bankers are tightening lending practices, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and farm lenders.

For debt-heavy growers, that can mean higher interest rates to cover spring planting or being denied by their existing lender, according to interviews with a dozen grain farmers.

As the scouts crisscrossed the Midwest, trouble was spreading that farmers may not have seen when talking to USDA in late July. Southern rust, a plant disease, freckled corn leaves, pustules black as pitch or bright as paprika. Spores clung to shirts and ballcaps.

Still, the crop was massive. Scout photos of heavy ears and dense rows spread online. Farmers grew testy, as the tone online turned from anxious to derision.

One afternoon, Iowa cattleman Mike Berdo, a 6-foot-4 wall of good humor, pulled his yellow pickup onto a field driveway to take samples. A man from a nearby farmhouse blocked him in, accusing him of trespassing.

Berdo explained he was with the tour, offered a hat, tried to smooth things over. The man drove off in a huff.

COST OF ABUNDANCE

While big agribusinesses can afford pricey private analytics, many farmers in the U.S. and worldwide rely on government data to help guide planting and marketing decisions.

There are fewer people producing that information. At the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service, roughly a third - 243 staff - left through the administration's incentive programs as of May. The Economic Research Service lost 78 staff, or about 27%.

That was before the shutdown. About half of USDA’s 85,907 employees were slated for furlough when the government shuttered this month, according to the agency’s lapse-of-funding plan. At ERS, 94% of staff was furloughed; at NASS, 91%. How many USDA jobs might ultimately be eliminated remains unclear.

USDA data and research can swing commodity markets, raising or crushing crop values and triggering algorithmic trades. What matters most, traders said, isn’t precision so much as consistency: whether the agency’s data aligns with market expectations.

That's why alarms went off in May when the USDA delayed a quarterly trade outlook and stripped out analysis linking a widening farm trade deficit to Trump’s tariffs. When it finally appeared, the tables were there; the analysis was gone.

Then came mistakes. In July, USDA announced a 135,000-ton corn sale to China - later corrected to South Korea. In September, it said China bought 68,000 tons of soybeans from this year's crop. The sale happened in January.

Some data sets are gone for good: USDA scrapped the Agricultural Labor Survey, used to help set H-2A guest worker wages, and the long-running Household Food Security Survey, a benchmark for hunger. Other reports halted by the Biden administration for budgetary reasons, such as the July Cattle Report, were revived.

On August 22, Pro Farmer analyzed the data and released its estimate: 16.204 billion bushels, a tour record but smaller than USDA's lofty outlook. Online, scouts were pilloried by analysts for bowing to farmer pressure to put out a lower forecast, and chastised by farmers for estimating too much. “Our opinion about the crop has not changed,” said Pro Farmer economist Lane Akre. “The data speaks for itself.”

Three weeks later, USDA updated its corn prediction with crop-insurance data submitted by farmers. It showed farmers had sown the most corn acres since the Great Depression, even more than previously thought.

USDA forecast American farmers would indeed produce a record crop, and raised its 2025 U.S. corn production estimate: 16.814 billion bushels.

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