crop prices

“One in five farmers could be pushed out of business by the sharp drop in farm income this year,” said Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith at a Senate hearing on disaster aid, and Arkansas Sen. John Boozman asked how rural America could survive the combination of high production costs and lower commodity prices without “significant help” from the government.

The farm economy stabilized in the Midwest and northern Plains but weakened in much of the country this fall as producers nationwide confronted high costs and lower commodity prices, said the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book on Wednesday. “Agricultural activity was flat to down modestly, with some crop prices remaining unprofitably low,” said the national economic summary.

U.S. net farm income will be a much better than expected $140 billion this year, the fourth-highest total on record, forecast the Agriculture Department on Thursday. Production expenses are down for the first time since 2018, while farmers are pocketing increased revenue from eggs, cattle, milk, and broiler chickens.

After soaring to sky-high levels following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, U.S. corn, soybean, and wheat prices are coming back to earth as supplies expand worldwide, said the Agriculture Department. The average price for corn this marketing year will be 27 percent lower, wheat 18 percent lower, and soybeans 10 percent lower than last season, said USDA analysts in a new look at global supply and demand.

Compared to food price inflation of 11 percent in 2022, grocery price increases will be virtually nonexistent this year, said a Wells Fargo analyst Wednesday during a panel discussion on the 2024 outlook for the food and ag sector. A Rabobank analyst said that softer commodity prices would take the steam out of the hot farmland market.

Farmers might still harvest the largest U.S. soybean crop ever, even if a rainy spring kept them from planting as much of the oilseed as they had intended. Meanwhile, growers planted slightly more corn than expected, despite high prices and tight supplies for fertilizer and pesticides, reported the Agriculture Department on Thursday.

Landowners told the USDA they will take 1.7 million acres out of the long-term Conservation Reserve and put it back into crop production, betting on profits from sky-high commodity prices. This year’s “general signup” for the reserve would also bring the smallest amount of land into the …

The largest U.S. farmers and ranchers say the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its disruption of grain, oil and fertilizer shipping, will drive up their costs of production, according to a Purdue University poll released on Tuesday. The Ag Economy Barometer also showed big operators are tempering somewhat their expectations of soaring input prices.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine will strain world grain supplies for months to come, driving up prices and inflation rates, said a panel of economists on Tuesday. "God forbid we have a weather problem this year," said Dan Basse, head of AgResource Co., who described war in the Black Sea region as the greatest supply shock since World War I.

The red-hot U.S. recovery from the pandemic, with the fastest economic growth rate since 1984, will moderate to a still-strong 3.5 percent in 2022, said the USDA in its first look at the agricultural economy in the new year. Farm-gate prices for corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton, the four most widely planted crops, were projected to decline as production, suppressed by the pandemic, catches up with demand.