Diesel Above $6 a Gallon: How Farmers Are Cutting Costs at Harvest
Diesel Above $6 a Gallon: How Farmers Are Cutting Costs at Harvest
Combines are rolling across the Midwest, and with them comes a fuel bill that few farmers have ever seen. Diesel has climbed past $6 a gallon in most of the country, and the national average has touched record levels above $6.50 in the past two weeks. For people who burn hundreds of gallons a day moving grain, tilling ground and hauling crops to town, the harvest has become a race against the fuel gauge.
According to AAA figures reported by CBS News, the national average hit a record $6.53 a gallon in late September, up 77 percent from a year ago. Another report put the gap at roughly $3 a gallon compared with the same point last year. In Iowa, Senator Chuck Grassley said he was seeing $6.57 at the pump. In Indiana, on-road diesel has been averaging about $6.92, which means topping up a 300-gallon semi tank costs a little over $2,000. Farmers are also entering the busiest fuel-burning stretch of the year. AgWeb noted that distillate use rises about 4 percent in the fall mostly because of harvest.
The causes sit far from the farm gate. Energy analysts say diesel is traded on a global market, and the war involving Iran and the war in Ukraine have disrupted both refinery output and shipping. The United States actually refines more diesel than it burns and exports somewhere between 23 and 30 percent of what it makes, but that does not shield American buyers when the world price jumps. Farmers are price takers at both ends of the business. They cannot set the price of the fuel they buy, and they cannot set the price of the grain they sell, which is why a fuel shock like this one lands so hard.
In Washington, the search for relief has turned messy. President Trump has said he favors halting diesel exports, and reports say the administration has weighed a 90-day ban. The White House has also reportedly warned France and Germany that they could face export limits unless they release emergency diesel stocks. Lawmakers have talked about a federal gas-tax holiday as well. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright has called an outright export ban a blunt tool that does not work, and a long list of business and industry groups signed a letter urging the administration to reject it.
The economics behind that warning are worth understanding, because they affect farm costs either way. Goldman Sachs estimated that stopping exports could cut diesel prices by about 25 cents a gallon in the short term, as long as refiners have room to store the extra fuel. Once storage fills, the bank said, refiners would likely cut output, and each additional week of a ban could push gasoline up by around 30 cents. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts reached a similar view, saying the relief might be felt first on the East Coast before a glut forced refiners to slow down. In short, the biggest-sounding fix may be the one most likely to raise prices later. Farmers hoping for a quick federal rescue are not getting much comfort from the experts.
So states are stepping in where they can. In South Dakota, Governor Larry Rhoden signed Executive Order 2026-11 on Monday. It lets farmers haul crops, livestock and other farm commodities at 10 percent above normal weight limits, which means fewer trips for the same load, and it suspends a $25 overweight trip permit. His spokesperson said the allowance now covers more than just field-to-bin trips and extends to deliveries to elevators, feedlots and other agricultural sites. The order does not allow trucks to exceed posted bridge limits or 20,000 pounds per axle. It also tells the state Department of Revenue to watch fuel supplies and consider a tax refund to suppliers if farmers are forced to burn regular diesel in their machinery because dyed diesel runs short.
The reaction from farm leaders has been mixed. South Dakota Farmers Union President Doug Sombke said the order does little to offset diesel averaging around $6 a gallon. A truck usually carries about 250 gallons, he pointed out, and a waived $25 permit does not come close to covering a fill-up. He also noted that neighboring Nebraska announced a 90-day pause on diesel taxes for agricultural producers during harvest. The South Dakota governor’s office replied that state law sets the diesel tax at 28 cents a gallon and does not give the governor the same emergency power to suspend it that Nebraska’s governor has. Others have raised concerns that heavier trucks could damage rural roads. North Dakota has taken its own step, with AgDaily reporting that the state now lets farmers run cheaper dyed diesel on highways.
While governments argue, farmers are doing what they always do, which is cutting what they can control. The clearest example comes from southwest Minnesota, where Ryan Vos farms near Hadley with his father and brother. His family has chiseled bean ground and disk-ripped corn acres every fall for as long as he can remember. This year, with diesel averaging about $6.28 that week, he is skipping fall tillage wherever he can. He expects about 90 percent of the family’s soybean ground to go untilled. Overall, though, they will still till 60 to 70 percent of their acres, he explained, simply because they planted far more corn than beans this year.
The numbers he shared tell the story. One of the farm’s Quadtrac tractors pulling a disk ripper can burn around 400 gallons in a day, which at current prices means more than $2,500 in fuel for a single tractor. Drought has made the work harder on iron too, since ground baked so hard that it threatened to burn points off the ripper and shanks off the chisel plows before a recent 3-inch rain. Replacement parts add up fast, and Vos says fuel is only half of his problem. He is not abandoning tillage altogether. Silage fields beaten down by chopper and truck traffic, end rows where equipment turns, and fields that get manure will still be worked, because compaction in those places can cost far more in the spring than the fuel costs now. His planters need a prepared seedbed, so the untilled bean ground will get a light field-cultivator pass ahead of corn.
University of Minnesota Extension educator Jodi DeJong-Hughes backs that acre-by-acre approach. Farmers who plan two chisel passes in the fall should try one, she advises, and shallowing up tillage equipment saves fuel and reduces wear on tractors, points and shanks. Longer-term guidance from Farm Progress shows how big the gap can be between systems. It puts fuel use for no-till at under 2 gallons an acre, against more than 6 gallons for conventional tillage. At today’s prices, that difference could be in the neighborhood of $24 an acre, though the figures come from earlier years and every farm’s numbers differ.
Leaving more residue on the field carries a spring bill of its own. Iowa State University water outreach specialist Mitch Harting says acres left untilled should be managed more like reduced-till or no-till fields. That means checking planter settings, adjusting row cleaners to handle extra residue, using enough downforce to cut through it, setting closing wheels so the furrow is firmly shut, and offsetting the planter three to four inches from last year’s rows. Skipping a pass, in other words, does not remove the management. It moves it to April.
Trucking is the other big lever, and it explains why South Dakota’s weight change matters to some even if it does not satisfy everyone. Fewer trips with fuller trucks, kept inside legal limits, cut gallons burned and hours on the road. Farmers are also planning field logistics more carefully, matching grain carts and trucks to combines so that nothing sits idling, and thinking harder about which fields to harvest first. None of these moves will erase a $2.50 to $3 per gallon increase, but together they can take a real bite out of the bill.
The pressure is showing up in how farmers see the year ahead. A study co-sponsored by the American Soybean Association and the National Corn Growers Association, and conducted by Farm Journal, found that fuel and energy ranked as farmers’ top input worry for 2027. On a five-point scale where five means very concerned, it averaged 4.16. In Illinois, grower Cody White told AgWeb that storms, tornadoes and 15 to 20 inches more rain than normal have already pushed his corn yields 25 to 30 bushels per acre below last year’s, and the fuel bill is now squeezing him from the other side.
Behind the spreadsheets sits a human cost that Vos says deserves attention. He wants other farmers to know they are not alone, and that it is acceptable to struggle and to ask for help. A harvest this expensive, after a growing season this hard, wears people down, and neighbors checking on neighbors may matter as much as any tax break or tillage plan.
For now, the advice from the field is practical. Count the gallons before deciding every pass, till where compaction really hurts, haul full loads within the law, and keep an eye on what your state and Washington announce next, since Nebraska’s tax pause shows that help can arrive quickly in some places. Check with your tax adviser before assuming any refund or exemption applies to you. Diesel prices may ease, or they may not, and the answer will depend more on events in distant refineries and shipping lanes than on anything decided at a farm kitchen table. Until then, farmers are doing what they have always done in hard seasons: getting the crop in, one careful pass at a time.
