American family farms are under heavy financial strain, with bankruptcies rising and farmer suicides running well above the national average — bad news for rural communities and anyone who still works the land.

• Farmers pay out all year for insurance, upkeep, pesticides and energy, but no money comes in until the crop is harvested.
• One wrong call on timing a harvest can wipe out tens of thousands in borrowed money, with no way to know the right answer in advance.
• Global competition and price crashes, like the 1983 raisin collapse, have wiped out multi-generation farms through no fault of the families running them.
• Farming forces flexibility and acceptance that some forces can't be controlled, unlike academia where a bad idea can survive for decades.
• Pesticides once sold as perfectly safe are now suspected in a string of cancer deaths in farm families, including Hanson's own.

Outlook: With costs rising and markets volatile, the gap between farms that survive and those that go broke will keep coming down to hard business decisions, not tradition.