COMO, Miss. — On a bright, dry Friday in Panola County, 73-year-old Sledge Taylor followed a routine he has kept for 53 years: he walked his fields to check on the young corn. The little green plants on roughly 4,000 acres are in an important growth stage when roots deepen and farmers usually side-dress nitrogen fertilizer. This year Taylor is considering skipping that application because nitrogen costs have spiked while corn prices remain weak.
Nitrogen is essential to corn yields, and global supply chains are under strain. About a third of fertilizer shipments and roughly one-fifth of the world’s fuel pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been disrupted amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. That disruption, coming at peak planting and irrigation season, has driven up fertilizer and diesel prices just when farmers need them most.
Taylor has been buying diesel ‘‘hand to mouth.’’ His operation has storage capacity for more than 20,000 gallons, but inventory has dwindled to about 1,000 gallons. ‘‘Sometimes we know that we’ve only got two weeks of fuel,’’ he said.
Farmers across the Delta were already reeling from earlier trade shocks. Tariffs imposed during the Trump administration and retaliatory measures by other countries severely reduced export markets the region relied on: China largely stopped buying U.S. soybeans, rice exports to Latin America fell, and prices for corn and cotton dropped. Taylor called the one-time Farmer Bridge Assistance payments he received insufficient, covering about 20% of his estimated losses.
The administration has said it delivered more than $30 billion in ad-hoc aid to farmers since January 2025, but the USDA did not respond to questions about whether more targeted payments are planned to offset recent fertilizer and fuel price increases.
A few miles away, 58-year-old Anthony Bland, who farms about 2,000 acres of rice and soybeans, is running the numbers. Delta producers rely on diesel-powered pumps for irrigation; a record drought has forced those pumps to run longer and pushed diesel costs sharply higher. Bland estimates diesel is roughly 60% more expensive than it was 45 days earlier.
Fertilizer costs have jumped, too. Bland said the 35 tons of fertilizer that cost him about $16,000 last year now would cost roughly $26,000. That figure doesn’t count rising expenses for parts, equipment and insurance, all squeezing already thin margins while commodity prices remain flat or fall.
Bland, whose family has farmed the Delta for generations, said he received some aid from the Farmer Bridge Assistance program but that it covered only around a quarter of his tariff-related losses. He also expressed frustration about changes to longstanding USDA programs designed to help Black farmers; he said recent modifications have weakened supports that smaller operations have historically depended on.
Bland said he did not vote for Trump in 2024. Both men said they oppose the war with Iran and worry that the combined effects of trade disruptions and the strait closure could force them out of farming. Bland is considering leasing family land or leaving the business; Taylor said he is nearing his limit.
Taylor compared the current squeeze to the farm crisis of the 1980s, when low prices, high interest rates and collapsing land values drove many family farms into foreclosure. But he said he has never seen such rapid, simultaneous increases in input costs. ‘‘We had folks barely getting by, and now they’ve been hit with two major cost increases at the worst possible time,’’ he said, warning that the pressure could put many farms out of business.
Mississippi’s Delta remains among the country’s most fertile regions — its soils, laid down by the Mississippi River over millennia, helped produce an estimated $9.5 billion in agricultural output in 2025. But the region also carries a long legacy of ‘‘King Cotton,’’ slavery and Jim Crow, and its rural communities continue to face entrenched inequalities. In recent years Black workers in the Delta reached settlements in lawsuits alleging discriminatory pay practices involving immigrant labor.
For multi-generation growers like Taylor and Bland, this season feels like a tipping point. With global conflicts and trade policies colliding at planting time, many small and mid-size farmers feel squeezed from both ends. ‘‘When big powers clash, it’s the small operators who suffer the most,’’ Taylor said, watching his rows of corn — a reminder that broader geopolitical and policy decisions can quickly make or break family farms.