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.
Minnesota farmers express discontent over prices, regulations at Farmfest
Low commodity prices, a stalled farm bill, and animal disease just some of the troubles swirling overhead at the summer’s end of 2024
The Minnesota Star Tribune
August 8, 2024 at 5:09PM
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administration comes into power next is open to reopening some of these trade agreements and addressing some of these outdated regulations that inhibit our use of these tools, such as vaccines,” Zimmerman said.
Currently the price of corn on the Chicago Board of Trade is less than $4 a bushel. Soybeans are hovering around $10 a bushel, putting farmers on tighter margins. A Federal Reserve Outlook earlier this year predicted financial belt-tightening, as farmers navigate falling incomes.
One analyst, Schultz, placed blame for the price woe on the Trump-era trade dispute with China over tariffs during the last decade, noting farmers in Brazil leapt in to fill the gap left by American producers, growing their stock from 85 million bushels of soybeans annually to 115 million bushels.
“The [2018] trade war with China may have come back to haunt us,” Schultz said.
Federal crop insurance and other tools remain in place, Schultz said. On Wednesday, U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Secretary Xochitl Torres Small toured Farmfest.
“Another thing I heard across the board was low commodity prices, and I recognize this is a time where there’s some real challenges,” Torres Small said.
This week, the USDA announced a plan to make its loan programs easier to access for farmers, including by pulling back the paper-load on applications and making the application process possible online.
Back on Capitol Hill, farm bill negotiations remain stalled. But Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat who appeared with ag industry officials on Wednesday, expressed optimism for a deal by year’s end.
“It seems to me with the farm bill,” Smith said, “sometimes you have moments of partisanship and then you revert back to the bipartisan approach because that’s how you get it done.”
The move means fast internet will extend to less populated areas in Crow Wing and Morrison counties.
