Farmers worldwide face a converging set of pressures that make producing food harder and less profitable than at any point in recent decades. Rising input costs, unpredictable weather, shrinking labor pools, volatile markets, and degrading natural resources all compound one another. Understanding these challenges explains why food prices fluctuate, why rural communities are shrinking, and why feeding a growing global population is far from guaranteed.
Climate Change and Crop Yields
Extreme heat, drought, flooding, and shifting rainfall patterns are already cutting into harvests. By 2050, climate change is projected to drag global crop yields down by about 8 percent, regardless of how aggressively emissions are reduced between now and then. The damage only widens after that: under a high-emissions scenario, yields of staple crops could fall 24 percent by 2100 compared to what they would be on a stable climate. Even with rapid cuts to net zero, the drop still lands around 11 percent.
The crops most people depend on are not equally vulnerable. Rice has roughly a 50 percent chance of actually yielding more on a hotter planet, partly because it thrives in warmth and elevated carbon dioxide. But for wheat, corn, soybeans, barley, and cassava, the odds of declining yields by the end of the century range from 70 to 90 percent. These six crops together supply about two-thirds of humanity’s calories, so even modest percentage drops translate to enormous shortfalls in food availability.
What makes this especially difficult for individual farmers is unpredictability. A season of record rain can be followed by severe drought the next year. Planting decisions, crop insurance, and infrastructure investments all depend on some degree of weather consistency, and that consistency is eroding fast.
Rising Costs of Fertilizer and Inputs
Fertilizer is one of the largest expenses on most farms, and prices have climbed sharply. The World Bank’s fertilizer price index rose 15 percent in just the first half of 2025, driven by strong global demand and ongoing geopolitical disruptions. Phosphate-based fertilizers have been hit hardest: one common type (triple superphosphate) jumped 43 percent, while another (diammonium phosphate) rose 23 percent in the same period.
Urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer, is forecast to increase 15 percent in 2025 before easing slightly in 2026 as new production facilities come online in East Asia and the Middle East. But even with those additions, prices are expected to stay well above the 2015 to 2019 average for years. Export restrictions from China, sanctions on Belarus, and tariffs on Russian and Belarusian products all keep supply tight. For farmers, this means the cost of maintaining soil fertility keeps rising while the price they receive for their crops does not always keep pace.
Labor Shortages and Wage Pressure
Finding enough workers to plant, tend, and harvest crops has become one of the most persistent problems in agriculture. Fruit and vegetable producers spend up to 40 percent of their total production expenses on labor alone, and those costs are climbing. Small farms have seen wage expenses increase roughly 30 percent year over year, while large operations face increases above 10 percent annually.
The squeeze extends beyond field workers. Wages for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, essential for getting products from farm to market, have risen 25 percent over five years. Regional variation is significant: annual increases in 2025 range from about 2 percent in North Carolina to 6 percent in Washington state. When farmers cannot find or afford enough workers, crops go unharvested, quality drops, and planting timelines slip. Mechanization helps for some crops, but many fruits and vegetables still require careful hand-picking that machines cannot replicate affordably.
Soil Degradation
The ground itself is deteriorating. Roughly 12 million hectares of agricultural land are lost to soil degradation every year, and about a third of the world’s soils are now classified as moderately to highly degraded. That degradation takes many forms: erosion strips away topsoil, compaction from heavy machinery reduces root growth, and repeated monoculture farming depletes nutrients faster than they can be replenished.
Degraded soil produces less. It holds less water, supports fewer beneficial organisms, and requires more synthetic fertilizer to achieve the same yields, which circles back to the rising input costs already squeezing farm budgets. Rebuilding healthy soil is possible through practices like cover cropping, reduced tillage, and crop rotation, but these methods take years to show results and sometimes mean accepting lower yields in the short term, a tradeoff many farmers cannot afford.
Market Volatility and Income Instability
Farmers are price takers, not price setters. They commit to planting months before harvest, lock in input costs upfront, and then sell into a global commodity market they have no control over. Research on coffee farmers illustrates the trap clearly: because trees take years to mature, growers cannot adjust their planted area in response to short-term price swings, leaving them fully exposed to international market fluctuations.
The toll of that exposure is substantial. Studies on Ethiopian households found the average family would be willing to pay up to 18 percent of its income just to stabilize prices, a measure of how damaging uncertainty is to planning and well-being. Price volatility also leads to lower farm investment overall, as farmers become reluctant to put money into equipment or land improvements when they cannot predict next season’s revenue. In some regions, volatile prices drive outmigration: younger family members leave for wage employment in cities, further depleting the rural labor pool.
An Aging Workforce
The people doing the farming are getting older, and not enough young people are replacing them. In the European Union, the average farmer is 57 years old, and only 12 percent of farmers are under 40. The pattern is similar in the United States and many other countries. High startup costs, uncertain income, and the physical demands of the work discourage younger generations from entering agriculture.
This demographic shift creates a slow-moving crisis. Older farmers may be less likely to adopt new technologies or shift to unfamiliar crops better suited to changing conditions. When they retire or pass away, their land often gets sold to larger operations or converted to non-agricultural use. The institutional knowledge they carry, about local soil conditions, water patterns, and pest cycles, disappears with them.
Mental Health and Suicide Risk
The cumulative weight of these pressures takes a severe psychological toll. Farmers worldwide report elevated stress tied to unpredictable weather, fluctuating markets, machinery breakdowns, financial strain, relationship problems, and social isolation. Research consistently documents that farmer suicide rates are at least double those of the general population. One study of farming, fishing, and forestry workers in Georgia found their suicide mortality was nearly three times that of all other occupations.
Age plays a complicated role. Younger farmers under 35 show sharply elevated suicide rates compared to non-farming peers, possibly because taking on major responsibilities early brings intense job strain and financial insecurity. At the other end, the highest raw suicide rates appear among male farmers aged 65 and older, at 22 per 100,000, driven by poor physical health, farm loss, fiscal problems, and relationship breakdown. Access to lethal means on farms, including firearms and pesticides, is a documented contributing factor across all age groups.
The combination of chronic financial stress and physical danger makes farming one of the most psychologically demanding occupations. These pressures are not abstract or distant. They shape daily decisions about whether to keep farming, whether to take on more debt, and whether the next generation will want to continue at all.