Prices for farm commodities — soybeans, corn, and others — are up this year, but farmers aren’t enjoying the benefits because their expenses are rising.
“I haven’t seen exactly what my input costs are going to be, but I know they’re way up,” said Billy Whittington, a Greenwood farmer who owns farmland on Money Road.
“You can’t even buy a tire for your truck or tractor without it costing twice what it did in the past — if you can get it,” he said.
Inputs are what go into a farming operation: fuel, seed, crop production materials and other equipment.
Whittington, who planted around 1,500 acres of soybeans this year, said he decided not to plant corn at all because of the rising costs of the crop.
“Fertilizers are way up,” he said. “I didn’t even plant any corn because the price was so high. It was getting late, I was getting so many rains (and) I couldn’t get it planted on time and the high fertilizer costs.”
Rising costs and supply issues have resulted from events with worldwide consequences.
Frank Howell, executive director of the Delta Council, said current events have taught farmers a painful lesson.
“Farmers don’t get to look at the news these days, about whether it’s a war in Ukraine or Chinese shipping problems, and go, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t affect me,’” he said. “I think farmers realize now everything that goes on in the world has a direct impact back to their farm shop.”
Farmers have had to endure several disruptive events over the last several years.
The 2019 season was heavily affected by historic flooding.
Another serious flood occurred in June 2021, one that Howell called “insidious” due to its timing. Farmers “had already spent a lot of money on the crops, and then we get 20 inches of rain across the swath of central to north central Delta, including Leflore and Tallahatchie Counties,” he said. “They never recouped those expenses.”
Andy Braswell, Leflore County’s extension agent with Mississippi State University, called the flooding “detrimental.”
“Last year, the flooding came on about June,” he said. “The corn was up 3 or 4 feet tall, we got a flood and folks just lost a bunch of acreage. That’s unusual to have that much rain in the first of June like it did to cause flooding like that.”
Andy Braswell, the Mississippi State University extension agent for Leflore County, says prices of fuel, fertilizer, seed and other things farmers use to plant their crops are way up. (By Kevin Edwards)
Another blow was when Express Grain Terminals LLC, a Leflore County grain storage and processing company, filed for bankruptcy in September 2021. It cost farmers approximately $54 million in crops that went unpaid. Whittington said the “fiasco” has been “a huge deal for the whole area, some more than others.”
Now, rising prices of inputs are the next challenge for farmers.
“Fuel prices, like diesel fuel, were running maybe $1.38 last year, and it’s $5-plus this year,” said Braswell. “That’s farm diesel, not highway diesel. Diesel with the dye in it to run farm equipment. Seed costs have escalated in price. Herbicide costs have escalated in price. It’s costing a whole lot more on crop inputs. The (crop) prices are pretty strong, but the cost of the chemicals have increased.”
For catfish farmers, Howell estimates that up to 50% of expenses this year can go to catfish feed and said the prices would make it impossible to break even this year.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a global impact on crops and inputs as well, Howell said.
“Ukraine is, I think, one of the top five corn producers in the world,” he said. “It’s number two in wheat production. You start mixing in the disruptions caused by that conflict, and it has a whole chain of events that go throughout the whole world. It affects not only those crops but every other crop that’s dependent on it, whether it’s livestock or feedstock.”
Belarus, Ukraine’s northern neighbor, is a major supplier of fertilizer. The war has caused a “staggering increase” to the cost of fertilizer, Howell said, and there were worries that the fertilizer supply would be cut off completely due to the conflict.
Even with the increases, Howell said that the worst fears have not come to pass and that the supply chain issues are not as bad as were predicted in the winter.
“If we look here at the beginning of the crop year, I think people are still hopeful they’ll have a good crop and that the higher commodity prices will offset the higher cost of production,” he said.
- This article first appeared in The Greenwood Commonwealth's 2022 Farming edition, published in May.
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