Hope for more certainties in 2026

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Agriculture’s economic conditions, trade and uncertainty in the ethanol market were among the topics of focus at the Illinois Corn Growers Association annual meeting.

Here are some of the issues Rodney Weinzierl, IL Corn executive director, discussed in an interview with AgriNews at the conclusion of the meeting in Bloomington.

On Economic Conditions

Part of the discussions and some of the presentations at the annual meeting dealt with what’s really the third year of an economic downturn on the farm. Both corn and soybean prices obviously are low, farmers are hurting, but what’s amplifying that is that input prices so far for fertilizer, seed, crop protection tools have not reacted to the lower ability of farmers being able to pay those the prices that have been high for the last three or four years.

That’s kind of compounding the effect of the price downturn, and hopefully in this coming year we begin to see an impact where the market begins to soften on those input costs.

It always seems that typically it takes the third year of the downturn and then you begin to see some relief on prices. We have not seen that yet. So, there’s a lot of conversation around, is there market consolidation? Has that gone too far?

What other impacts, if the government sends out an emergency support payment, which is needed, do people see that and think, well, now the farmers have more cash, we don’t need to lower our prices?

There’s a lot of things that are being talked about around that, but it is a challenge that now we’re going to go into the fourth year of a downturn carrying those high costs.

On Farm Bill

Within the budget reconciliation that passed back in May, there were a couple farm bill titles that were addressed, Title 1, which is kind of the farmer safety net program, as well as crop insurance. Both of those were reauthorized going forward. But there’s still, I don’t know, 10, 11, 12, titles that have not been addressed.

When we met with some of the Illinois delegation members on the committee, they think that we’re going to see discussions probably in the second quarter of 2026 around a “skinny farm bill.”

But within the continuing resolution that was just passed by Congress and signed by the president that opened the government back up, they did extend the farm bill until Sept. 30, 2026.

Does Congress get to it? I think it really kind of depends on how Congress works together over the next nine, 10 months. Or, do we see another short extension once we get past the midterms?

Because when we go through late summer, you begin to have a lot more Congress people thinking about, well, I need to get elected, and they kind of get in an election mode instead of governing mode.

On Trade

I think that there’s been a lot of good agreements struck by this administration with other countries. Getting those codified, not only within our government and signed, but also seeing the governments of the other countries codifying what those agreements are just to put more certainty in those agreements instead of just kind of more all verbal and some print, that would be helpful.

We’re entering a stage where the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement is up for renewal in 2026. Mexico is by far is our biggest market for corn and corn products. Canada is by far our biggest market for ethanol. And so having that kind of move through regular order by the end of 2026, early 2027, getting that will create more certainty amongst probably our biggest trading partners.

On Biofuels

A lot of work needs to be done by Congress to get the biofuels back on track and hopefully Congress does that.

It’s fine if the administration does temporary fixes or Environmental Protection Agency does some temporary things, but that’s the problem when we change congresses or we change administrations that the industry is kind of operating in a yo-yo environment.

In farming, like in any business, certainty is important. You can plan for certainty. It’s hard to plan for anything when there’s so many balls in here.