The Real Reason Farmers Aren’t Adapting to Climate Change
Guest post from Northern Iowa Farmer Wendy Johnson
Note: If you don’t know her or of her, I’m very happy to introduce Wendy Johnson to my Substack readers. She contributed this heartfelt and informative story you’re about to read. Her bio is at the end.
I grew up in Charles City, Iowa in the 1980s, on a corn, soybean and hog farm. It was the height of the Farm Crisis. Farmers had been encouraged to expand, so many had taken out big loans to buy more land and grow more corn and soybeans. But as these crops flooded the market, prices went down. This was bad enough, but when interest rates started climbing, the debt became too much for many farms to bear. My family managed to hang onto our farm, but money was tight and we qualified for welfare. I grew up drinking government subsidized milk and eating government subsidized yellow cheese due to the overproduction of dairy. I didn’t see the irony of this until much later. My dad worked really hard, so much in fact, that I never really saw him. My sister and I took care of our 4-H animals in the summer and walked beans, weeding with a hoe in the days before GMO seeds. It was actually a great childhood in many ways, but I couldn’t wait to leave Iowa.
After college, I moved to Los Angeles where I pursued a fashion career. But a decade in, I felt that something was missing. In 2009, my grandmother passed away and it was then that I started to think about the farm. If we sold it to the highest bidder, it would probably just be a drop in the bucket for a much larger farmer, who might never know the land the way I had as a kid. So in 2010, I moved back to Iowa, to farm. My dad agreed to mentor me. I went along with him to scout fields for weeds, and he showed me what chemicals to use to get rid of them. He showed me what fertilizer to use for raising corn and soy plants, and how to follow commodity markets to get the best price for our two crops. He taught me to farm much like how he had once taught me how to ski - brought me to the top of the hill, told me to point my skis inward, and then left me to figure it out on my own. I made a lot of mistakes at first, but I learned quickly.
I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Despite growing up on the farm, I didn’t have much direct farming experience. As a woman and an Asian-American, I had two strikes against me. Men wouldn’t look me in the eye, nor shake my hand. Anytime I went somewhere with my dad and my mom wasn’t there, they thought I was his wife or girlfriend. But I had no idea that the biggest hurdle I’d face would be crop insurance.
The Iowa I returned to in 2010 was nothing like the one I remembered from my childhood. No one was raising livestock anymore except inside big confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and huge feedlots. There were fewer farms and farmers, and the machinery had gotten much bigger. Ethanol plants were everywhere: including a new one just a few miles from where I grew up.
My dad tried to help me succeed in this kind of farming. When I decided I wanted to raise sheep, he taught me to wean the lambs early, then fatten them up in the feedlot with corn. But I realized early on that this way of doing business wasn’t going to work for me. I was constantly giving medicine to both the lambs and the ewes (who were out in a field with poor forage), trying to hold the whole operation together. And it just felt like it would be a whole lot easier if I worked with nature, rather than against it.
After four years of learning from my Dad, I decided I was ready to strike out on my own. I rented a field from my family, transitioned it to organic, and put my sheep out on the healthiest pasture. I moved them daily from one paddock to the next, not allowing them to eat too much in one place. I stopped feeding them corn to fatten them up fast. And the soil started coming to life. Legions of earthworms appeared, where I’d barely seen any before. The sheep and the plants became healthier, and I didn’t have to give them medicine or chemicals to help them grow.
I liked farming this way, so I started going to conferences focused on regenerative agriculture. As some of the more experienced folks explained to me, regenerative agriculture is about working with the natural rhythms of our land, and less about controlling them with chemicals and fossil fuel derived fertilizers. By building healthy soil and adding a greater variety of plants and animals to our farms, we create self- supporting ecosystems that generate their own fertility and keep pest problems in check. This makes regenerative agriculture a safe, low-input way to grow food that contains more healthy nutrients.
Empowered with this new knowledge, I started expanding my little rental plot, and adding new farm enterprises. In addition to sheep, I started grazing cattle and chickens, and selling the meat to local families. I planted over 6,000 fruit and nut trees, started growing a perennial grain called Kernza, and built out prairie pollinator habitats, riparian buffers and restored wetlands. After a dozen years of working my way into this profession, I felt like I’d finally succeeded as a farmer. But after converting just a fraction of the family farm to regenerative, I realized why no one else was doing it this way.
To his credit, my Dad had included me in everything from the very beginning, wanting to be sure I had a clear-eyed view of all aspects of running the farm. So it wasn’t long after I got home that I sat in on my first meeting with our crop insurance agent. I knew, of course, that harvests could be devastated by unlucky weather, and that farmers took out insurance to protect themselves against a particularly bad hailstorm or heat wave or a drop in prices. But I had no idea just how central this crop insurance was to our family business.
As the insurance agent rattled off several different options, I dutifully took notes, trying to understand the pros and cons of each type of coverage. But as the conversation progressed, it became increasingly clear that no matter what my Dad chose, the value of our insurance hinged on one key number: our Average Production. History, or APH.
Our APH, as the name suggests, is the average yield of a specific crop over a ten-year period. The US Department of Agriculture uses this number to estimate what our yield should be, as a way of estimating how much loss we should be compensated for in the event of a disaster. Fair enough. But I quickly realized how much the pressure to keep this number up was shaping what my Dad did – and what every other farmer in our state was doing too.
For one thing, crop insurance was a huge factor determining what my dad was planting: corn and soybeans. These were the only crops we had a 10 year history of growing, and the yields had been pretty good. If you don’t have ten years of crop history for a crop, you have to use your average county yield, which is typically lower than your own potential yield. If you are growing something other than corn or soybeans, it is likely uninsurable either because there are no other growers in your county to create an average or you have to start from scratch to build your APH, which takes ten years.
But this pressure to maintain a high APH was also shaping how we were growing these crops. No one wanted to risk a dip in their APH due to leaving any potential yield on the table. So it was routine practice, I learned, to overapply fertilizer and other inputs, just to be sure you had as much as the plants could possibly use. As I heard one farmer say, “I’ll throw everything in with the kitchen sink because there would be too much to lose if I didn’t.”
But it wasn’t just individual farmers making these decisions to prioritize their APH above all else. Banks were playing a big role in this dynamic too. There were some farms in our county that had been established and successful for generations and had built up enough equity to finance their own operations. But for most of us, farming at the scale of modern agricultural operations requires debt financing, and banks won’t lend to us without insurance. And what do they want to see? The high APH that we can only achieve with conventionally-raised corn and soybeans.
As I’ve seen in my own family, farmers are increasingly aging out and retiring—and if there are no descendants to take over, the land goes up for auction. You might think this would be a chance to shake things up and bring in some new crops. I certainly thought so. But since land values are now based on the guaranteed returns achieved with high-APH crop insurance, the only type of operation that really pencils out for a would-be farmland owner is the same old corn and soy scheme that’s literally become the only game in town.
This has all been very discouraging to me, but the biggest loser in this system is undoubtedly the American taxpayer. When I first started farming, my dad told me he might file an insurance claim once every 10 years or so. This might have been the case several decades ago when our climate was more stable, but that has now become untrue. Today, more and more farmers are filing a claim every year. The Trump administration and Congress, driven by commodity lobbyists, have responded by increasing subsidies for crop insurance, lowering the cost of premiums to farmers. Last year’s reconciliation bill (The One Big Beautiful Bill), enacted $6 billion in increased crop insurance subsidies and an additional $54 billion to commodity programs over 10 years. But with so many losses to cover, costs continue to increase and will eventually be too high to bear.
There are things we could do immediately to eliminate some of the wasteful spending on the current crop insurance system. We know from a recent report by the General Accountability Office (the nonpartisan watchdog that audits federal agencies) that many of the approved crop insurance providers (AIPs) receiving federal subsidies are profiting handsomely from these policies, often well beyond market rates. This same report found that these providers were incentivized to service large commodity farms, often leaving smaller farms underinsured. The Government Accountability Office made some good suggestions for how to mitigate these issues and save billions of dollars in the process, by capping premiums and limiting profits for the approved crop insurance providers receiving subsidies.
But I think we need to go even further, and have a real conversation about how to reduce risk of crop loss in the first place. It’s clear that monocultures of corn and soy are not resilient to our current or future climate here in Iowa, and that we’ll need more diversified and regenerative farms if we want to actually grow food rather than just filing insurance claims for a living. Moving in this direction would also improve our water quality (another ticking time bomb) and produce more of the nutrient- dense foods that people need.
This year, we have a rare opportunity to change the incentives shaping farmers’ decisions, as Congress works to reauthorize the $1.5 trillion federal Farm Bill. These are four changes we could make to that bill that would allow farmers to adapt to climate change without going broke:
First, we could change the basis for crop insurance payouts, and tie the size of these payments to the use of risk-reducing practices rather than APH. Under this system, farmers could qualify for higher payments by reducing their risk of crop loss with practices like longer crop rotations, cover crops, reduced tillage, and planting perennials. Much like a good driver discount for car insurance, this would incentivize farmers to create a less risky environment for everyone (in this case, by building up healthy soils that can better withstand extreme weather). Land should be a depreciative asset unless a landowner can prove it is gaining organic matter and increasing in soil health metrics.
Second, farmers, not corporations, should own farmland. You can invest in farmland today and never step foot on the farm you own. Farmland ownership should be by farmers. This will help un-commoditize farmland and make it affordable for the next generation of farmers.
Third, we could guarantee a baseline market for diverse crops by stipulating that at least 15 percent of SNAP funds be used for locally produced foods. Corn and soy
markets have long been propped up by federal policy (most recently with the renewable fuel standard for ethanol), and diverse crops will need a similar boost to become stable enough for farmers to switch over.
Finally, we could help farmers and businesses build the processing facilities necessary to bring these crops to market by providing tax credits and grants for new diversified agriculture infrastructure. Ethanol plants already get federal support of this nature, which is one reason they are so ubiquitous. Farmers who grow corn for ethanol can readily find a buyer nearby. But in order to market my Kernza perennial grain, a climate smart crop with deep roots, I have to haul it one tote at a time to a small cleaning and dehulling facility two hours south of my farm. That facility doesn’t have the financing to add food grade processing equipment, so once I pick up my dehulled Kernza, I have to haul it two hours north of my farm to a food processor in Minneapolis. Oh, and my organically certified Kernza has to go all the way to South Dakota. But with grants and tax credits, my local processor could expand, and I could just do all my business with him, which would mean less time driving and more time farming.
With these four reforms, I think what we would see over time is that soils and plants would become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, and we wouldn’t need to file so many insurance claims. More folks would be interested in farming, and there wouldn’t be so many financial barriers to entering the profession. With guaranteed income tied to regenerative practices, banks would be thrilled to give loans to regenerative farmers. And with less fertilizer, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides seeping into our watershed, we’d see cancer rates decrease, and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico heal.
Moving back to Iowa 18 years after I left was the best thing I ever did. I get to see the smiles on my customers’ faces when they come to the farm to pick up their locally- raised, pastured, hormone-free meats and eggs. I get to see the trees that I planted mature and produce delicious apples and chestnuts. And I walk my fields in the early morning or at dusk, I hear so many more birds than I did when I first came back.
At the end of the day, farmers just want to grow products that help feed, clothe and house people in a way that is honest and that allows us to make a decent living. We want to know we can leave the place in good shape, so future generations can continue building a thriving business while doing this essential work. Some might say that I started my career in farming at the worst possible time, as extreme weather and market consolidation have pushed this Midwestern family farming tradition to the brink of collapse. But it’s also the moment when we have a chance to change, and to put our farms on a more stable course for the years to come. We still have a window of opportunity to keep what topsoil we have left and restore our land using regenerative agriculture practices, while keeping family farms afloat. The future of food depends on what we choose to do now.
Wendy Johnson is a regenerative organic farmer and grazier in Northern Iowa, where she operates Jóia Food & Fiber Farm, a regenerative organic farm, and co-manages 1,000 acres of conventional corn and soybeans with her dad. She is a contributor to the new book, Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods.
Thank you for sharing this story. Im so glad Chris put this on the substack, more people need to hear stories like this and see how a better future is possible.
You are an inspiration! It is so important to help us all understand the options available so we can make good choices.