“Passing that baton off is the ultimate win,” Matt Montgomery told me. “That’s really what we’re running for — passing it off to the next generation.”

We were talking about waterhemp, until we weren’t.

Because as Montgomery would tell you from his position as Beck’s educational agronomist, managing waterhemp is a daily, up-at-dawn siege throughout the Midwest growing season. It costs a lot of money, and then it costs a lot of yield, which also costs a lot of money. It’s not the place to cut corners, even in a lean year like 2025.

Controlling waterhemp, like farming, is supposed to be a long game.

In agriculture, farmers are in it for the long haul, farming land for decades with the hope of passing that land on to sons and daughters, who will take care of it like they did. And yet, agriculture is changing. In Illinois, 56% of the farmland is owned by an absentee landowner, which means cash rent payments are driving decisions. Sometimes on an annual basis. What’s it going to take to make ground pay in a year like 2025? That equation gets pretty tough at $400-plus cash rent.

By the numbers

Professional farm managers expect significant cash rent declines in 2025, by as much as $29 an acre on excellent-quality farmland — down from $410 to $381 an acre. And University of Illinois ag economists say slightly lower fertilizer and fuel costs will help reduce projected costs. Here’s their outlook on 2025 breakeven prices to cover all costs, including land:

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It’s grim: Based on current market expectations for corn and soybeans, farmers are looking at negative returns across every region of Illinois. Indeed, average farm income across all Illinois farms could be negative $30,000 per farm, or lower.  

That’s going to be especially hard for farmers with lower working capital levels and higher debt-to-asset ratios, many of whom are younger and building their operations.

That’s why we just published a story on 15 ways to farm better in 2025. It’s going to be tough but there will be opportunities. Illinois farmers have just come off historic net farm incomes in 2021 and 2022, which means they’re coming into this downturn in decent financial shape, with historically low debt-to-asset ratios at the end of 2024. Debt-to-asset ratios averaged 0.17, which means there was 17 cents of debt per $1 of assets.

That’s good. That’s the long game.

Because agriculture is a cycle. Low-income periods aren’t unusual in agriculture, especially following market highs. This will turn around eventually.

Land and the long game

But like Montgomery says, winning might look different in 2025. Winning might mean doing the following:

Stop the bleeding. Minimize the loss.

Reframe your mindset this year: Success may mean being the best of the best at surviving. Preservation.

The ultimate win in 2025 might be hanging on to pass the baton off to the next generation. Because Illinois farmers are tough and smart and they have great resources.

And every single sale where the auctioneer drops the gavel on a piece of land and sells it to a farmer who’s decided to continue investing in this business shows the kind of long-term dedication farmers have to the business of agriculture.

We actually just did this. My husband and I were fortunate to be able to buy 160 acres earlier this month at auction for a decent price. It’s the first ground we’ve bought in more than a decade, and despite every negative number I just shared, we were in the right position to do it. And just minutes after the gavel dropped, our son happened to call home from college.

“So, what’s going on at home?” he asked.

And I got to tell him: “Well, we just bought a farm.”

He was excited and so were we. And someday he and his sisters will farm it.

Passing the baton to the next generation? That’s winning in 2025.

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