While Congress spent most of the fall perfecting the useless art of finger pointing, the ag economists, farm finance experts, and ag policy wonks at farmdocDAILY kept grinding through the season's farm news and numbers to understand what it all might mean for farmers and ranchers in 2026.

Their well-researched opinion? While farm equity slipped this year, it remains relatively stable due to large "contemporary," or same-year, federal payments. Overall, however, farmers remain under threat in 2026.

Moreover, the emergency spending bill approved by Congress to end the historicallylong, 43-day shutdown holds no new solution for farmers to get off today's higher-costs/lower-prices treadmill.

The key to most of the brewing trouble lies in what has become Congress' go-to way to handle tod

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