U.S. farmers are facing one of the widest gaps in a decade between what they pay to produce food and what they earn from selling it.
U.S. Department of Agriculture data released on Dec. 15 show that by October 2025, the prices paid index had climbed to 154.6, while the prices received index had fallen to 120.5. The agency measures the indexes against 2011 levels, which are set to 100, making it easier to see how prices have changed over time.
In practical terms, that means production costs were more than 50 percent higher than in 2011, while prices farmers received were only about 21 percent higher.
That gap reached 34.1 index points in October, the widest spread in the data going back at least a decade, according to the data. The prices paid index tracks a wide range of expenses, from fertilizer and fuel to feed and labor. Meanwhile, prices for crops and livestock have slipped from their recent highs.
This hasn’t always been the case. In parts of 2021 and 2022, rising commodity prices helped close the gap. Since then, prices received have dropped faster than costs have come down, reopening the spread. These indexes don’t measure profits directly, but they offer a clear signal of rising financial pressure on farm operations heading into the next season.
How does USDA compile this data?
The price indexes come from a mix of surveys and market data collected by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
To track prices paid, USDA surveys thousands of agribusinesses each year about what farmers are paying for hundreds of inputs, including fertilizer, fuel, feed, seed, machinery, and labor. Those prices are combined into a single index that reflects overall changes in farm production costs.
To track prices received, USDA collects monthly data on what farmers earn for crops and livestock. For major crops, that includes surveys of grain elevators, mills, and buyers. For livestock, the USDA relies on daily and weekly price reports from packing plants and auctions.
The USDA then turns those prices into indexes, setting a base year at 100, to show how prices today compare with earlier years rather than listing dollar amounts.
This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. The piece, known as Data Harvest (formerly Graphic of the Week), is Investigate Midwest’s way of making complex agricultural data easy to understand.
