09/15/2026
I’ve seen some random pages coming across my Facebook lately saying that $6 diesel is going to make farmers raise the price of their crops, which will then make food at the grocery store more expensive.
I don’t know about every type of farming, but we don’t have control over what we sell our crops for.
I’ve also seen posts suggesting farmers shouldn’t harvest their crops as a way to “go on strike” and avoid purchasing fuel during what is literally our busiest and most fuel-consuming time of the year.
Again, I can’t speak for every type of farming, but yeah… we’re going to need to harvest our crops when they’re ready. Otherwise, we don’t have an income.
Does anyone else ever wonder who is behind some of these posts and what the actual goal is? Because sometimes it almost feels like farmers are being encouraged to do things that would hurt us more than anyone else.
We’re already struggling with high input costs and tight margins. Why in the world would anyone suggest we leave a crop sitting in the field that we’ve spent all year and a whole lot of money growing?
Not that farmers are actually going to listen to that advice. We know we have to get our crops out. But still, who thinks this stuff up?
And back to the idea that farmers will just raise crop prices because diesel went up…
Yeah, no. That’s not how this works.
We get paid by the bushel based on what the commodity market says our crop is worth. We can hedge, buy puts or calls, use options and work the board a little to hopefully gain a few cents, or lose a few cents sometimes, but we don’t get to set the price.
We aren’t sitting around saying, “Well, wheat cost us more to grow this year, so we’re going to charge more for it, and now your bread is going to cost more.”
We don’t have that ability.
Commodity prices can move with energy prices and a whole lot of other factors. They’ve come up some recently, but they certainly haven’t risen dollar-for-dollar with what fuel costs us. And, honestly, we don’t necessarily want commodity prices to shoot through the roof either, because that creates a whole different set of problems.
So if food prices go up because diesel, transportation, processing or other costs go up, don’t automatically blame the farmer.
We didn’t set the price.
And please stop sharing the post that encourages farmers to stop harvesting in protest. It’s dumb.
For a lot of us, that crop is our annual, or biannual, paycheck. We kinda have to go get it.
