Sean Dengler and his wife spent a long time deciding to have their first child. The Des Moines-area couple are still deciding on the second.
He’s 34. She’s 35, which means another delivery by cesarean. Their son is 9 months old. Dengler works for an agriculture nonprofit, and his wife works in recruiting for a construction company. They own their home, and neither carries student debt because a relative who died left enough to cover college.
By Dengler’s own accounting, he is fortunate. He said so multiple times over the course of an hour-long interview.
At the same time, when he and his wife pay their bills, he has to seriously think about whether they’re going to be good to cover expenses.
The arithmetic
In 2020, Dengler was laid off from an audiovisual company that staffed live events, a job that stopped existing when the events did. His father was nearing retirement from the family farm but wasn’t ready to quit. So Dengler went back to the fifth-generation corn and soybean farm, a 90-minute commute each way, because moving back home would’ve cost his wife her job and the family their health insurance.
He made good money for a stretch when grain prices were higher. But input costs climbed and kept climbing, and the operation was relatively small.
“I’m gonna get out before I get myself into deep trouble, and get out a little ahead,” he decided.
He now earns a little over $50,000 a year, up from the roughly $40,000 he was making in 2020. His wife earns a little more. What Dengler said surprised him wasn’t the raise, but how little it affected his family’s life.
“It really isn’t going as far as I thought it would,” he said.
They bought their house in 2018 for about $180,000. Dengler said Zillow now estimates it’s worth about $250,000.
“To think of the income we made then, and I know other people probably aren’t making a ton more,” Dengler said. “We would have no shot at that time if we were trying to buy a house today at [$250,000].”
The war and tariffs
Two forces have contributed to American prices shooting up over the past two years.
Tariffs came first and moved slowly. Import duties raise costs at the border, and those costs reach store shelves over months as inventories turn over and contracts are negotiated and renegotiated. Iowa agriculture felt the impacts of tariffs from multiple directions. There were higher prices for imports, and retaliatory tariffs that priced American crops out of foreign markets.
China, historically the largest buyer of American soybeans, stopped purchasing them in the fall of 2025 before a trade agreement restored sales.
The war with Iran moved prices immediately. Gasoline averaged $2.98 a gallon on Feb. 28, 2026, the day of the first US and Israeli strikes. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for global oil shipments, and pump prices crossed $4 for the first time since 2022. Consumer prices rose 0.6% in April after 0.9% in March, the steepest annual increase in nearly three years.
The most recent consumer price index summary from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed all items are up 3.4% over the last 12 months, ending in August 2026. Food is up 2.7% and energy 16.3%.
Fuel costs travel past the pump. Diesel rose faster than gasoline—roughly 48% compared with 45% between late February and early May—and diesel moves freight. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates the Iran war has added $820 to the average household’s fuel costs as of Oct. 6, projected to top $1,100 by the end of fall.
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What’s actually up
Grocery inflation in the Midwest was at 2.6% year over year as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering Iowa and 11 neighboring states. That’s a modest number, but it is stacked on increases that aren’t. Grocery prices nationally have risen roughly 17% since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beef is the exception Dengler noticed first, and the data backs him up. USDA reported beef and veal prices 5.9% higher in August than a year earlier, and expects another 9.4% increase across 2026. The American Farm Bureau’s annual cookout survey put two pounds of ground beef at $14.06 this summer, up from $13.33 in 2025. Meanwhile, the national cattle herd is the smallest it has been in 75 years.
Dengler said his household eats more chicken and turkey now because of the increased beef prices. He also works from home now, which he described as luck he didn’t plan for. When he was farming, he filled up twice a week.
His explanation
Dengler mentioned the war as something that pushed farm input costs up, but he also mentioned consolidation as a reason costs continue to go up.
“[Companies] can just get away with raising prices because they know you don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said.
He spent years buying seed, chemicals, and fertilizer as a farmer and worked professionally on agricultural policy. He writes about market concentration on his own Substack, reads antitrust newsletters, and says he thinks the US lost its way when it stopped using antitrust laws to keep markets competitive.
On beef, the structure he describes is documented. For a pound of ground beef selling at $6.49, the National Farmers Union calculates that the farmer receives $2.42. Four meatpacking companies—Cargill, JBS, Tyson Foods, and National Beef—control most of the market between the pasture and the shelf.
Dengler said he doesn’t want a cap on prices or radical change, he wants a fair and free market.
“It should not matter if I have more money than you,” he said. “You should compete on quality and service.”
The toll booths
The complaint he returns to most often is smaller and harder to measure.
He ordered gutter supplies from Menards recently rather than drive to the store. He noticed a difference in price between his computer and his phone.
“There’s a $3 difference,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s related to any AI or anything like that.”
He also noted a separate processing fee, and he didn’t understand it.
“At least tell me ‘this is what we’re paying our workers to do to pick your stuff,’ but I’m also like, shouldn’t that be factored into your price already as a business?” Dengler said.
He describes the same experience when buying several other items, like concert tickets or booking a hotel room. None of it alone is enough to dissuade you from buying the thing, but it adds up.
“The way they sneak in and take a little more money, not enough to drive you mad…and just being like a toll booth basically for you to do something,” he said.
What it looks like at the end
Dengler grew up a mile from his grandparents. On his block, four farmers worked every 160 acres. When he got out of farming, nobody on that block was farming anymore.
He said the town has gone the same way.
“The pharmacy closed this last year. The doctor’s office has closed. MercyOne had a clinic there. They closed,” Dengler said. “Seeing all these changes to this town that I loved…really impacted me.”
A second child
Infant care in an Iowa childcare center averages about $1,058 a month, roughly $12,700 a year, according to Iowa Child Care Resource & Referral. Dengler said he and his wife chose a local provider deliberately, avoiding chains and private equity-backed operators, and doesn’t begrudge the cost. He wants the workers to get paid well. It’s still the highest line-item cost in the household budget.
If costs rise further, the first thing he said he’d cut is retirement savings, and he doesn’t expect Social Security to be fully there. He knows having a cushion to cut from is itself a privilege.
He would like his son to have a sibling. He’s run the numbers more than most, has a finance degree, and still isn’t certain whether it’s financially viable.
“I don’t blame people for not having kids if they think it’s gonna be expensive,” Dengler said. “It’s already hard enough to just be a parent trying to keep another human alive. I don’t know. It’s hard.”
