What problems did the farmers face in the 1870's?

Answer 1

Farming is an inherently risky business. Yields, prices, and incomes can fluctuate wildly from year to year.
The beginning of their complaints and political activity coincided with the widespread switch from self-sufficiency to commercialization in agriculture.
Farmers in the Midwestern plains were drawn into a system of crop specialization and borrowing from lenders to finance commercial agriculture. This was a relatively new lifestyle for them. The stresses and strains of this new lifestyle was a recipe for political-economic problems.
Robert McGuire in his paper "Economic Causes of Late-19th Century Agrarian Unrest" hit upon the idea of correlating the incidence of protest activity by farmers with the variability of measures of price, yield, and income of 4 major crops -- wheat, corn, oats, and hay. He computed Spearman rank-order correlations across states and found that those states most active in the protest movements usually had the highest variability of prices, yields, and incomes. The correlations where between .73 and .81.

Farmers could not run large sheep flocks because the climate was too mild and moist, the soil too poor, or the land too forested

Answer 2

Getting products to a market was a big one. Even if you were close to a railroad, the railroad barons would rip you so bad it was sometimes to expensive to ship and get a few dollars return' in profit. That's why Jesse James had so many people who would hide him from the Pinkerton rail detectives! The poor people hated the railroads and their gouging ways

Answer 3

The massive Mormon cricket or locust invasion--I think that was in 1874. My great great great grandfather lost his entire Kansas farm and decided to move west after that