Area farmers feel impact of rising fuel, fertilizer costs

SEYMOUR – As gas, diesel and fertilizer prices continue to rise, area farmers are seeing the impact on their bottom line and have begun adapting their farming practices to minimize the blow.

Diesel prices have gone up 75% in the last three months, reaching record high prices in Wisconsin at $5.84 per gallon earlier this week.

With planting season in full swing and harvest season on the horizon, running farm machinery is a necessity, even with increased costs.

“It’s something that affects every farmer in the area, especially at this time when everyone is out planting and getting crops in the ground,” said Isaiah Skenandore, owner of Skenandore Farm LLC.
“It’s an important piece to make sure that people understand the impact that this is having,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin following a tour of Skenandore Farm LLC. “Whether it’s the trade war last year, the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act] this year or the war of choice in Iran this year, it has consequences and American farmers, Wisconsin farmers and Wisconsinites generally are paying the price for this right now.”

While a suspension of the federal gas tax has been suggested, Baldwin said she hopes to see a more impactful solution to bring down prices.

“I want the people I represent to have an affordable life, including filling up the gas tank...” Baldwin said. “Certainly, the idea of relieving the 18.4-cent (per gallon) gas tax is on the table for discussion right now, but it’s just 18.4 cents and it’s what funds our highways and our bridges and our roads. I haven’t made a decision on how I would vote, but there are things we can do that would have a much more drastic impact: Number one, end the war and see that the Strait of Hormuz is opened up, and number two, while we’re experiencing these high prices at the pump, the big oil companies are having record profits — they should face a windfall tax and they shouldn’t be war profiteering. I think that would be a much more prudent thing...That would alleviate the pain a lot more.”

In addition to the cost of fuel impacting farming operations, one-third of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Since attacks on the shipping lane began, prices have gone up 25%, leading farmers like Skenandore to reconsider how they utilize fertilizer on their farms.

“We’re a big proponent of regenerative farming, so fertilizer is something we tried to limit to have to spread in the first place,” Skenandore said. “We utilize our horse and cow manure and get that back onto the fields. But as the prices of fertilizers continue to rise, we soil sample and we just fertilize what we have to. Thankfully we’ve seen over the years the soil quality continue improving with the operation and we’ve been able to use less and less fertilizer over the years.”

Even with those practices in place, though, Skenandore still anticipates a blow to his budget.

“The price of fertilizers is still high and is continuing to go up,” Skenandore said. “That affects us. We put it on our hay fields. We do soil samples so we don’t have to put too much fertilizer out, but it’s still going to affect us on our bottom line.”

In addition to rising costs, farms like Skenandore’s have also faced challenges in the form of programming cuts.

In 2023 and 2024, Skenandore Farm LLC was a participant in the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that provided funding for state, tribal and territorial governments to purchase locally produced foods.

The LFPA program aimed to maintain and improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency while allowing states, tribes and territories to procure and distribute local and regional foods and beverages that were healthy, nutritious, unique to their geographic areas and that met the needs of the population.

In 2025, the LFPA program faced cuts of over $1 billion.

Organizations that had been getting food no longer had the necessary funding to continue to purchase it and farmers no longer had a guaranteed outlet for their produce.

Through the LFPA program, Skenandore was able to share the meat raised on his farm with elders in his Oneida community and elder Tribal members throughout Wisconsin.

‘We were planning on [participating] again last year, but those contracts got pulled in March...” Skenandore said. “That was really a two-fold hit. The vulnerable population that needs the high quality food had it taken away...And for the producers that scaled up and were planning on having that security and knowing where your produce was going to go, we had to find a new outlet for that.”