A National Strategy for American Agriculture

American agriculture has spent decades optimizing for yield. The results are clear in the output, but the economics around that production have become harder to defend.

The U.S. agricultural trade balance has moved from a longstanding surplus to a record deficit. The deficit reached $31.8 billion in FY2024 and $43.7 billion in FY2025. Commodity prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat have fallen roughly 25% to 35% from their 2022 peaks, while farm production expenses remain near record levels. USDA projects direct government farm program payments of $44.3 billion in 2026. Those figures point to a farm economy under growing financial pressure, even as the sector continues to deliver high levels of productivity.

The institutions and incentives that produced today’s agricultural economy were designed around a different set of priorities. They remain highly effective at driving production, but they are less equipped to respond to the pressures now surrounding it.

That is the premise of S2G’s new report, Building the Missing Market: A National Strategy for American Agriculture, which I co-authored with my colleague Aaron Rudberg. Rather than treating yield per acre as the primary measure of success, we argue for greater focus on risk-adjusted profit per acre, meaning how much a farmer keeps from each acre and how reliably they keep it after costs and risk are accounted for.

That framing puts a different set of issues at the center of the policy conversation. A farmer considering a new crop, production system, or land use may face limited buyer certainty, weak pricing power, financing that does not align with the transition period, or infrastructure ill-suited to a different approach. Those constraints sit alongside broader structural pressures, including concentrated input and processing markets, an aging farmer base, and intensifying global competition.

The report translates that diagnosis into a 10-year roadmap focused on changing both the conditions farmers operate within today and the markets they will need in the future. Rather than treating policy, capital, infrastructure, and innovation as separate workstreams, the roadmap organizes them across three phases designed to progress from testing new models to establishing them at scale.

• The first phase focuses on testing regional approaches that combine production changes with new approaches to financing, risk management, and input use.
• The second centers on strengthening the institutions that connect farmers to committed buyers, processing capacity, advisory support, and capital.
• The final phase shifts toward making successful approaches durable through broader changes to federal programs and market structures.

Agriculture policy is conservation policy, trade, rural development, energy policy, climate policy, healthcare and nutrition policy, food security, national security, and more. The good news is that American agriculture already has many of the technologies, institutions, and sources of capital needed to advance these pieces, but the larger challenge is creating a coordinated framework that ensures our system includes this broader ecosystem and rewards profitability, resilience, and stronger market access at the farm level. That will require policy reform to advance across more than one vehicle. The Farm Bill remains important, but appropriations, USDA rulemaking, targeted legislation, state-level experimentation, private procurement, and new financing models can all advance pieces of the agenda in parallel.

The question now is whether the U.S. treats these pressures as a series of isolated challenges or as a signal that the agricultural system itself needs to evolve. In my view, the choices made over the next several years will shape who can afford to farm, what gets grown, where investment flows, and how competitive American agriculture remains over the long term. This report does not have all the answers, but is intended to help support a more coordinated strategy and broaden the discussion across the public and private sectors about what it will take to get there. 

We welcome reactions to the report and encourage anyone interested in continuing the discussion to reach out.