Farm Catch Up

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so let’s take a look at what’s been going on in agriculture. And since this is January 2018, maybe take a peek at the crystal ball (I actually use an old tennis ball because, well, have you seen what a good crystal ball costs these days?) and see what might be going on in the upcoming year.

Dicamba has been in the news again. This time the Arkansas state legislature has weighed in on the issue. It’s legislative council has approved the Arkansas plant board’s ban on the use of Dicamba from April 16 to Oct. 31. The board put the ban in place after receiving almost 1,000 complaints of Monsanto’s new “no-drift” blend of the herbicide doing exactly that, drifting, and damaging thousands of acres of crops in the state. The company has released the hounds lawyers, is filing for court orders, is threatening to sue everyone in sight, has launched attacks against at least one individual member of the plant board, and it’s getting nasty real fast.

Meanwhile other big soybean growing states have instituted new, much stricter controls on the use of the new herbicide after hundreds of thousands of acres of crops were allegedly damaged by the new blends. Even the feds have gotten into the act, instituting stricter rules and usage regulations about using the stuff.

Monsanto and it’s partners that are selling these blends claim that the drifting isn’t their fault, and that it’s the farmers and people performing the applications that are to blame. The clam is that they’re using the wrong equipment, spraying at the wrong time, at the wrong temperature, and even using not Monsanto’s patented product, but straight dicamba that they’re purchasing elsewhere that volatilizes much more easily. But in order for this much damage to be caused that way, a huge number of farmers and applicators would have to be breaking the law, and I don’t believe that. Commercial applicators won’t risk it. They could lose their licenses, get huge fines, be sued, basically be put out of business if they didn’t apply these products in the proper way. And farmers who apply these products themselves would face similar penalties.

A2 Milk – I don’t recall now if I’ve talked about so-called “A2” milk before, but if you haven’t heard of it yet, you will in the near future. I suggest you go read the Wikipedia article on it which goes into extreme detail, and which has a plot like a soap opera, complete with bankruptcies, threats, untimely deaths, utterly ridiculous health claims including that it cured diabetes, cancer, etc., bogus marketing scams and I don’t know what all else before it finally became “legit”. I just re-read it and– oh brother, it’s a mess. The thing you want to remember about A2 milk is that it is, well, milk. The only difference is that the casein in the milk has a slightly different chemical makeup than A1 type milk. Nor is A2 milk entirely free of the A1 type of casein. Despite all of the hype, it is still just milk, and there seems to be no real basis in fact for any of the health claims being made for it. If you want to drink it, fine. But for heaven’s sake, don’t pay more for it than you’d pay for regular milk because it doesn’t cost any more to produce the stuff than it costs to produce A1 milk.

Dairy – There doesn’t seem to be much good news for the dairy industry for 2018. Thanks to continued overproduction and a projected increase in production during 2018 of 3% or more, milk prices look like they’re going to be heading down, with some people predicting the price could drop to $13/CWT or even lower. A dairy economist over at UW Madison thinks prices could climb as high as $16 in the second half of the year, but he seems to believe that production and demand are going to start to balance out, and frankly there doesn’t seem to be any real reason to believe that.

Some people think China is going to dramatically increase imports of milk products, but there’s no real reason to believe that, either. China has had a moderate increase in imports, but not to the point where it is having much effect on milk prices.

Don’t look to NAFTA for any help, either. If anything, the NAFTA negotiations are doing little more than making Mexico and Canada increasingly irritated. But more about that lower down on the page.

About the only good thing that’s happened in the dairy industry is that cattle feed prices have remained fairly low. But while that’s good news for dairy, it’s bad news for grain farmers.

Corn – Corn prices don’t look like they’re going to get much better either. Despite predictions that farmers are going to be planting less acreage in corn in 2018, the amount of grain actually produced isn’t going to be shrinking much because of improvements in yield, and as a result the price of corn on the commodities market has remained at or near the $3.50 level, where it’s been for months now. Demand for corn appears to be relatively flat.

As is the case with milk, there is hope that China will start to ramp up imports of corn, but there seems to be no real proof that is going to happen any time soon. The biggest buyer of US corn used to be Mexico. In 2017 Mexico curtailed it’s purchases of US corn, and has been talking to sellers in Brazil and Argentina. Increased sales to Japan has made up for some of that loss, but the way things are going in the political arena, don’t look for any improvement in grain exports any time soon.

NAFTA – The trade agreement that administration officials were claiming would be done in just two or three weeks back in mid summer of ’17, wasn’t, of course. Negotiations are still going on, and despite public statements by the administration indicating things are going just fine, they aren’t. Behind the scenes reports from the proverbial “unnamed source” indicate that things are definitely not going well. And when one considers that the ruling party in DC can’t even negotiate with it’s own members to keep the government funded and has to depend on the opposition to get enough votes to keep government offices open, that shouldn’t be surprising.

The question isn’t when a new NAFTA will be negotiated, the question should be is there going to be any kind of NAFTA at all. Right now I’d say that the chances of NAFTA being successfully renegotiated are around 50/50.

Author: grouchyfarmer

Yes, I'm a former farmer. Sort of. I'm also an amateur radio operator, amateur astronomer, gardener, maker of furniture, photographer. View all posts by grouchyfarmer