MORGAN, MINN. – A grain analyst speaking onstage at Minnesota’s annual Farmfest was asked for the good news in agriculture. He just chuckled at the laundry list of challenges.
Where to begin? The cost of inputs? The rising threat of a trade war?
He opted to open with the fields flooded by the deluge of summer rains.
“You’re probably in an area that will be behind the eight ball on the size of your crop,” said Mark Schultz, grain marketing analyst with Northstar Commodity. “U.S. agriculture is in a bad predicament right now.”
As farmers gathered this week at a field in Redwood County, many sampled pork chops on a stick while listening to an array of politicians and industry gurus take their opportunity on the event stage. Topics ranged from the bottoming-out corn prices to the looming shadow of regulation, including California’s Proposition 12, which is upending hog confinement practices for the industry after withstanding a Supreme Court challenge last year.
“The challenge now we see is a patchwork of regulations,” Lori Stevermer, president of the National Pork Producers Council, said on Wednesday. “If California has a rule for how we have to raise pigs, and Massachusetts has a rule for how to raise pigs, what’s to prevent another state and another state [from imposing rules on farmers]?”
The specter of regulations also looms over poultry farmers, bedeviling an industry working to stay profitable while fighting H5N1, often called bird flu. John Zimmerman, National Turkey Federation chair, said that current foreign trade rules prevent farmers from vaccinating their flocks because they’ll lose access to some foreign markets.
“I hope that whatever [presidential] administration comes into power next is open to reopening some of these trade agreements and addressing some of these outdated regulations that inhibit our use of these tools, such as vaccines,” Zimmerman said.
