Two Midwestern Farmers Union leaders say farm bankruptcy numbers don’t tell the whole story about the financial crisis in U.S. agriculture.
There
were 595 Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies in 2019, the highest level since 2012.
But Nebraska Farmers Union president John Hanson call bankruptcies “the tip of
a very large iceberg”.
“There’s
a lot of what I call ‘voluntary quits’, where folks are in their mid-60’s and
they’re going to retire—although they didn’t want to—because they’re losing
enough equity and they figure they’re going to be in a better position to be a
landlord,” Hanson says.
