Arkansas farmer bankruptcies are on the rise in 2025. That’s compared to last year at this time. That’s according to the latest figures provided by researchers at the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture. During an interview on Arkansas PBS, extension economist Ryan Loy said the increase in costs and lower crop prices have led to this. “One way to make, make inputs cheaper, you know on the front end would be to prebook them, you know, ahead of time. Get a cheaper price, you buy bigger in bulk. But not all farms have, you know, have that ability to do so. And so the farms that can, you know, do what they can do on that front. But the ones that can’t, you know, they still have to pay that high, very high input cost and receive that same price for the commodities.”
As Little Rock Public Radio reports, Loy also said while Arkansas farmers are doing what they can to avoid bankruptcy, there are factors outside of their control. Last year alone, Arkansas farmers accounted for nearly 27% of Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings in the 8th Federal District Court. Chapter 12 allows farms to reorganize to pay debt. Loy says he expects that number to either stay the same or increase this year.
In a July 15 statement from the University of Arkansas’ Cooperate Extension Service, Loy explained, “We’ve had 259 filings in the United States between April 1 of 2024 and March 31 of this year.” Loy added that the number of filings in the first quarter of 2025 outpaced those of the same period in 2024. The economist concluded, “We’ve already beat last year in terms of Q1 national filings,” he said. “Once you see this on a national level, it’s a clear sign that financial pressures that we saw before in the 2018 and ‘19 are kind of re-emerging.”
