Tariffs, war, and now a historic drought have converged into a ‘perfect storm’ for U.S. farmers and food prices

American farmers entered the spring planting season knowing fertilizer would be more expensive, fuel would be costly, and labor would be short. With the growing season now in full swing, they can add a record-setting drought and scarce water supplies to that list of headaches. An overlapping series of headwinds—ranging from climate to economics and geopolitics—have made farming in the U.S. an exceptionally brutal profession in recent months. The headaches started last year when the Trump administration’s sweeping tariff regime warped the country’s trade policy, raising input costs for farmers and crowding out international buyers. This year, the war in the Middle East has caused the global fuel and fertilizer trade to sputter, further squeezing farmers’ margins. And as spring continues, 61% of the continental U.S. is under moderate to exceptional drought conditions , according to NOAA, including 97% of the Southeast and two-thirds of the western U.S. For farmers, the upshot is reduced yields and potentially failed harvests. For everyone else, the towering pile of crises likely means higher food prices for the rest of the year. “What’s unique about the current moment is that you have this perfect storm of factors,” David Ortega, an agricultural economist at Michigan State University, told Fortune . An unseasonable hit What makes the current drought stand out more than anything is its timing. Farmers are accustomed to dealing with sweltering temperatures and dry conditions in the summer, but not this early in the year. Last month was the warmest March on record . The drought has spread over huge portions of the country’s agricultural land. “It’s unusually dry in various parts of the country,” Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, a resource economist at Cornell University, told Fortune . “It’s been hitting hard in the Central Plains and in parts of the South, all along the Cotton Belt.” Huge swaths of staple crops in the South and the Midwest are under drought conditions, according to …