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Survey: farmers are concerned about supply chain disruptions, input costs
Farmers are less optimistic about current conditions in the agriculture industry, according to the latest Purdue University/CME Group Ag Economy Barometer.
Jim Mintert is the director of the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture.
“Producers are telling us that 2022 looks like it’s going to be a much lower income year than 2021 and that’s despite the fact that we’re looking at some pretty high commodity prices,” he says. “So, people are concerned about the rise in the costs of inputs especially on the crop side, but across the board.”
Nearly 60 percent of farmers surveyed expect farm input prices to rise by 20 percent or more in 2022. Thirty four percent of producers said they expect prices to rise by 30 percent or more.
Mintert says farmers are also concerned about availability of inputs. About 30 percent of producers surveyed expressed difficulty accessing at least one crop input.
“It was pretty much across the board with people having trouble obtaining herbicides, insecticides, fertilizer, or farm machinery parts,” he says. “The whole supply chain snafu continues and it’s not just one or two things…All of that, in addition to the difficulty and the price aspect, has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty and that has led to this weakness in farmer sentiment. I think people in agirulcutre are acclimated to the idea that prices for crops and livestock can be relatively volatile, but we’re not used to seeing this level of volatility in input prices and we’re particularly not used to seeing a challenge with respect to buying the inputs that we really want. That uncertainty is causing farmer sentiment to be weaker than you would otherwise expect coming off a relatively high income year.”
The overall Ag Economy Barometer declined six points to 119. The index of Current Conditions fell 13 points to 133 and the Index of Future Expectations held steady around 112.
The monthly national survey of 400 agricultural producers was conducted Jan. 17-21.
Audio: Jim Mintert
