Colorado Public Radio has a sobering look at what is happening on Colorado farms right now, and it is not the pastoral postcard politicians love to trot out when they need a barn backdrop. Heat and drought are hammering production, irrigation water is disappearing, fertilizer and other input costs are climbing, and some producers are staring at a year where breaking even would qualify as a win. Weld County farmer Marc Arnusch told CPR he ran out of irrigation water at the end of April and did not plant a single crop this spring.
Meanwhile, Washington is doing what Washington does best: turning an urgent problem into a procedural hostage situation. Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill since 2018. The latest Senate effort stalled before lawmakers headed off for summer recess, with Republicans short of the votes they needed and Democrats unanimously opposed amid a fight over SNAP policy. Farmers, naturally, are left trying to run real businesses under rules built for a world that existed eight years ago.
The insult is not that government has done absolutely nothing. The Trump administration has sent billions in ad hoc payments, and congressional Republicans tucked shorter-term agricultural provisions into last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Those measures have helped keep producers standing. But the farmers CPR interviewed made the larger point plainly: they do not want to survive by waiting for Washington to invent another emergency check after the barn is already smoking. They want a stable, understandable policy framework that lets them plan ahead and depend less on government, not more.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Colorado agriculture is getting squeezed from both directions. Drought and heat are cutting water and production while seed, fertilizer, repairs, fuel and other costs keep climbing. Apparently Mother Nature and the balance sheet formed a bipartisan coalition.
- Some farmers are talking about the 1980s farm crisis again. Rocky Mountain Farmers Union President Chad Franke told CPR he sees troubling parallels, although today’s credit and land markets are different. When the people who lived through farm auctions start using that comparison, perhaps Washington could interrupt its regularly scheduled food fight.
- Emergency payments are keeping farms alive, but farmers do not want government-by-rescue-package. One producer told CPR he would rather have reliable crop insurance than another ad hoc payment cobbled together after disaster hits. Radical concept: create rules before the emergency.
- The Farm Bill remains stuck in congressional machinery. The latest dispute centers heavily on SNAP policy, including whether certain changes should be delayed one year or two. Somewhere underneath that argument are actual farmers trying to decide whether they can afford to put seed in the ground next year.
- Short-term fixes bought time, not certainty. Farmers told CPR that some crop insurance and program-payment issues have been addressed for the current fiscal year, but agriculture requires planning years ahead. You cannot run a farm like Congress runs a continuing resolution.
My Bottom Line
Everybody loves Colorado agriculture when it comes with sweet corn, cattle, a mountain sunset and a politician wearing suspiciously clean boots. The romance gets a little thinner when the actual farmer says, “I have no irrigation water, my fertilizer costs are nuts, commodity prices stink, and I need to know what the rules will be next year.”
That is where the political machinery is failing. Not because there is one cartoon villain twirling his mustache in Washington, but because the entire federal policymaking apparatus has become remarkably talented at recognizing a crisis while remaining structurally incapable of responding to it like grown adults. Republicans have their excuses. Democrats have theirs. Committees have procedures. Senators have recess. Farmers have crops, bills, weather, and deadlines that do not care about any of the above.
And here is the part the professional political class ought to tattoo somewhere visible: the goal should not be making farmers more dependent on Washington. Arnusch said the opposite essentially. Good farm policy should make farms and rural communities resilient enough that they need Washington less. That is conservatism with dirt under its fingernails. Predictable rules. Functional risk management. A safety net you understand before disaster strikes. Then get the bureaucrats out of the cab and let producers produce.
Because when viable family farms disappear, Colorado does not just lose a business. Rural communities weaken, local resilience shrinks, and more of the food system winds up controlled by economic and political forces farther removed from the people actually growing the food. We can keep admiring agriculture in campaign photos, or we can build policy that gives agriculture a fighting chance. At some point, even Washington should be able to tell the difference between supporting farmers and sending flowers to the funeral.
Source: Colorado Public Radio
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