California, Arkansas, Georgia and Iowa Are Leading the Nation in Farm Bankruptcies, New Federal Data Shows

Chapter 12 was written specifically for family farmers and fishermen with regular annual income. It allows an operation to reorganize its debts on terms suited to a seasonal, land-heavy business while continuing to farm — which is why it has long been the number reporters and lenders reach for when they want a read on farm distress.

Chapter 11 is the broader business-reorganization chapter. Agricultural operations turn to it when their size, entity structure, or particular circumstances mean they don't qualify for Chapter 12 or don't fit neatly inside it. Those filings are still farm failures in every practical sense, but until now they have not been counted alongside Chapter 12 in farm-stress reporting.

According to AgWeb's reporting on the launch, NASDA and NALC say tracking both chapters together, for the first time in a unified dataset, gives a far more complete picture of distress than Chapter 12 counts alone. The 201 Chapter 11 filings the DEBT project identified between January 2021 and June 2026 represent roughly one in seven of the 1,401 total filings — a share large enough to change how a given state's stress level reads.

Chapter 12 filings are easy to identify as agricultural because the chapter itself is limited to farmers and fishermen. Chapter 11 is not — the same chapter covers airlines, retailers, and restaurant groups. So the project needed a way to separate the farm filings from everything else.

AgWeb reports that SAS, an analytics company and longtime NASDA partner, cross-referenced bankruptcy filings against USDA Farm Service Agency program-recipient records. Where an entity appeared in both the bankruptcy record and the FSA program data, that match was treated as the indicator that the filing was agricultural in nature.

NASDA and NALC attach their own caveat to that method: because the match depends on FSA participation, the Chapter 11 data may miss operations that don't take part in FSA programs. By the organizations' own account, the true agricultural Chapter 11 count is likely higher than the 201 filings reported in this first release.

By total filings, the DEBT dataset puts four states at the top. California leads the nation with 95 filings — 73 under Chapter 12 and 22 under Chapter 11. Arkansas follows with 83. Georgia and Iowa are tied for third at 82 apiece. AgWeb's article did not break out the Chapter 11/Chapter 12 split for Arkansas or Georgia, and we are not estimating one here.

Ranked by Chapter 11 filings specifically, the picture rearranges. Iowa leads with 26, the highest Chapter 11 count of any state, followed by California with 22 and Texas with 12. Texas does not appear among the top four states by total filings, and the source article did not disclose its total.

That divergence is the more interesting finding in the release. Chapter 11 skews toward larger and more complexly structured operations — the ones whose size or entity form pushes them outside Chapter 12's eligibility. A state can therefore sit mid-pack on total filings while carrying an outsized share of the business-scale failures, which is what the Texas figure suggests and what Iowa's Chapter 11 lead reinforces.

Georgia's position matters for landowners in the Southeast in particular. Tied for third nationally in total filings, it is one of four states carrying the heaviest measured load in this dataset. Landowners tracking conditions there can follow county-level coverage on our Georgia land page.

The DEBT release lands on top of a run of reporting pointing the same direction. PlaceAcre covered the six-year-high surge in Chapter 12 filings earlier this year, and independent reporting from Illinois-based Farm Policy News (farmpolicynews.illinois.edu) corroborated that April 2026 Chapter 12 filings reached their highest monthly level in more than six years.

Farm Policy News attributed that April spike to a familiar combination: elevated interest rates, high input costs, and compressed operating margins. Those are the conditions that turn a thin year into a solvency question, particularly for operations that expanded acreage or equipment on borrowed money during a stronger stretch of the cycle.

What DEBT adds is scope rather than a new trend. The monthly Chapter 12 counts showed the direction of travel; the unified 2021–2026 dataset shows how much of the distress that measure had been leaving out, and where it sits geographically.

Bankruptcy counts are a lagging measure of pressure that built up over prior seasons, and they tend to show up in the land market after the fact. Rising filings often mean more distressed and inherited acreage reaching the market from owners who cannot wait out a slow private sale — an estate that needs to settle, a family splitting an inherited parcel, an operation shedding outlying tracts to protect the home place.

For a landowner, the practical question is timing and certainty rather than headline price. A listed sale can bring a stronger number when there is time to wait for the right buyer, financing that holds together, and a survey or title issue that resolves cleanly. When any of those are in doubt, the calculation changes.

A cash sale is one option among several, not the default answer. PlaceAcre buys land directly and can put a no-obligation offer in front of an owner within 24 to 48 hours, which is worth weighing against a listing when a payoff deadline, a tax bill, or a lender conversation is driving the timeline. Owners who are not under that kind of pressure are usually better served taking their time.

NASDA and NALC describe DEBT as a "first step" rather than a finished product. The organizations plan to keep the dataset updated on a live, PACER-linked basis, and they note that cases can move between chapters after filing — meaning individual entries, and the Chapter 11 versus Chapter 12 totals, can shift as cases progress.

Two things are worth watching. The first is updated snapshots extending past the June 2026 cutoff, which will show whether the pace of filings in the first half of 2026 held, accelerated, or eased. The second is state-level follow-up analysis, which the rankings themselves invite: Georgia and Arkansas both sit near the top of the national count without a published chapter breakdown, and that gap is the most obvious place for the next round of work.