By Jesse Allen
American Ag Network
(BATON ROUGE, LA) — The fertilizer and fuel price spikes squeezing U.S. agriculture are not a regional story. They are reshaping farm balance sheets from the Mid-South to the Midwest, and an LSU agricultural economist says the relief producers are hoping for is unlikely to come fast.
“This isn’t a Louisiana thing or a Mid-South thing. This issue is very real and is resonating across farm country right now,” Dr. Michael Deliberto of the LSU AgCenter said in a recent interview on Market Talk. The numbers he shared come from Louisiana enterprise budgets, but the cost pressures he detailed mirror what producers are reporting nationwide.
Coming into 2026, Deliberto said most farmers and lenders already expected a difficult year. Louisiana growers were buoyed by record corn and cotton yields in 2025, and the “one big beautiful bill” handed producers an improved farm safety net. Still, the agricultural lending environment was tight, and geopolitical disruption has scrambled the math even further. Even after a meaningful run-up in futures, Deliberto said, “we still got a long way to go to get some of these costs absorbed.”