Crop Report: USA spring wheat production up over 50%, record high for soybeans
release.nass.usda.gov
release.nass.usda.gov
Also the podcast Escaping 1980[1] if you want an example of a global event that drastically altered US ag production, leading to a decline/crisis that plenty of farmers still have as a pivotal event in their memory.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/15891377-mastering-th...
[1] https://aei.ag/escaping1980/ (not that AEI)
Meta, but my favorite part of HN is the exposure to books I'd never come across otherwise.
OTOH, fertilizer prices at the time of planting were crazy high.
Expenses up, revenue down. Farmers are going to be in a world of hurt this year.
Potatoes don't have a future market, and they are still planted. Though I believe even then big names like McDonald's contract all their potatoes in advance.
Monopoly is one seller, many buyers.
Monopsony is many sellers, one buyer.
A selection of on set of policies by one provider in Saskatchewan (granted, not the US) can be found at https://www.scic.ca/crop-insurance/program-overview/multi-pe...
I have the right to maximize my short-term gains, but if the consequences catch up to me, I will demand subsidies and bailouts from the same society I totally don't participate in.
Instead, rather than planting today and selling "here's X bushels of wheat I've harvested" months in the future and hoping for the best, farmers sell futures (that is: "in <growing time> months, I shall deliver X bushels of wheat") for most of their expected yield.
Lo' and behold, here's what the futures prices looked like around planting time [1: look at YTD]: high due to demand from those that had expected to have Ukrainian wheat to buy after the harvest, and then back down when that price signal resulted in sufficient wheat being planted to satisfy demand and thus an increased supply of farmers writing futures on it.
Edit: damnit, it's subscriber only; here's an excerpt
My cryopod popped open,
revealing a man in a silver
jumpsuit. "Welcome to the
future! Here's your onion."
[...]
The brain's first strike had
decimated the human populace. A
few survivors, remembering the
AI's blind spot, had made it to
the onion capital of the world
- Vidalia, Georgia. There a
biohacker had used the last
working CRISPR systems to
create a strain of colossal
onions, hundreds of feet in
diameter. The remnants of
humanity huddled inside their
onion domes, ignored by the
triumphant machines.
The next steps required the
ability to move freely, outside
the domes. In the dying years
of the human economy, people
had experimented with
tokenization of regulated
products. Casinos had tried to
argue that their customers
weren't gambling with money,
they were merely gambling with
tokens that could be trivially
exchanged for money.
Decentralized financial markets
insisted that sure, you had to
have a license to trade stocks,
but they were just trading
tokens that could be trivially
exchanged for stocks. The
government hadn't bought it:
any token representing an
object is legally equivalent to
the object. So the huddled
remnants of humanity set out
turning people into a token
representing onions.There are also conservation programs where the government takes a multi year contract on marginal land, but you will earn more money farming the land in most cases, unless it is a swamp or something.
Now it's maybe just peanuts compared to the rest of the budget. Who knows, but American farmers do quite well these days.
>Soybean Production Up 2 Percent from 2021
>Cotton Production Down 28 Percent from 2021
>Winter Wheat Production Down Less Than 1 Percent from July Forecast
This is directly from the first paragraph of the release referenced.
Spring what is different from Winter wheat.
We gained 180 million bushels of spring wheat, but dropped 750 million bushels of corn.
Actual food corn I'm willing to bet is unlikely to face any real impact.
Look at acres planted if you want to know what farmers expected in spring. Look at 5 year averages if you want to compare the yields with something.
Spring wheat was planted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and will be harvested starting shortly. That is really what is notable here - American farmers have done this in response to geopolitical events.
As for corn, the forecast has been pretty terrible given drought, heat and fertilizer shortages. All in all, I'd say that farm output in the US is far better than was predicted earlier this year.
for comparison, Ukraine exports about 900 million bushels per year and Russia exports about 1.5 billion bushels per year.
The optics of the war seem a little staged. Gas prices down, wheat exports … up? It almost makes sense for Russia to dig in and prolong the war beyond a year to show that such optics are not sustainable by the US.
Strategically, if I were Russia, I wouldn’t even consider a ceasefire until winter passes and Europe gets hit with heating costs, just to make my point. It’s the only point of leverage left.
In normal times. But now most of Ukrainian wheat exported by sea and probably almost all exported by ground gets hoarded by Europe without getting to the most vulnerable African countries.
War is a factor, but weather is bigger
[1] https://www.postregister.com/farmandranch/crops/grain/idaho-....
Our big mighty tech utopia metropolis sometimes seem a lot like the tower of Babel where we've convinced ourselves we've beaten and overcome nature and we are masters of the environment. Well God comes along and gives us a dry year or two and suddenly we start remembering how completely out of our control most of our existence is. If you're the religious sort praying for some rain for the potato farmers in ID be mighty appreciated.
This was a pretty entertaining presentation.
How is that up 50%?
[1]: https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/tm70mv...
[2]: https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/k35694...