Part of this issue is the fertilizer price and part is the almost 5 dollar a gallon diesel fuel. Fertilizer in this area mostly all gets trucked in from Houston as it is needed.
What people need to realize is what these inputs actually mean as we are just into spring planting here and it goes to the north as it warms up. If fertilizer hits 2320 dollars which it appears it will easily, that will mean my input cost on one single item will be 1000 percent higher. Figure in diesel costs twice as much this year and parts are ridiculously expensive and hard to come by as well as oil and lubricants to service my equipment and you are basically going to come up with a commodity price that is 15 times what it was last year.
All that will rapidly filter down to the grocery stores as most all of it is traded on the futures and what that boils down to is if a grocery bill from last year cost 200 dollars I wouldn't be surprised to see it north of 2000 before very long for the same items.
I highly recommend planting a garden if a person is able to and stock up on flour, salt, yeast, dry goods and can goods while the market is still sane.
I plant a 50’x50’ garden. I went to Southern States three weeks ago to buy seed. Plenty of seed. I asked about fertilizer and was told they had some. Another employee chimed in they still had some because the price was so high. I was then told the manager had already let the employees know that, as of three weeks ago, they had zero fertilizer in their distribution chain, nothing for spring planting coming. My immediate fear was producers like you being told the same thing. Have you heard of a projected end of the line of fertilizer supplies at any price yet?
Re: 11 - Am signing up for a CSA with a local farmer that has been doing that for about 40 years. Just don’t have time with work to tend my own garden, plus it supports a local producer and workers. The CSA farmer used to do cash cropping but leases out all non-CSA acreage to a local dairy farmer than milks ~2500 cows.
Holy . . .
I knew prices were climbing fast, but I didn’t realize it was THAT fast!
My farm doesn’t use “boughten” fertilizers, but the farms around mine do. I worry about them, some are going to be hurting soon.
Manure is about to be worth its weight in gold.
I know several dairy farmers in NE WI that are going back to the old ways.
My best friends nephew, who took over his farm and milks 50, is going to forgo any soybeans this year and no shelled corn. He has been talking to me on how to hook up an old vibra shank behind his manure tank spreader to knife the liquid manure directly into the ground. Took some doing but its ready and will work.
He can get fertilizer, but like you said, it’ll kill him financially.
So..they’ll knife the manure into the ground and get onto the fields straight after and plant after some seed prep. They are not going to plant till the ground is good and warm to get the corn up before the weeds so they can cultivate. He is fixing his old WD45 up which had a six row cultivator to get on to cultivate.
So it will be peas and oats into the silo along with the first cutting hay, and oats for ground feed for the cows and the corn will all get chopped into the silo in the fall. No soybeans, no combining corn. Figures the savings from paying to have the corn and beans custom combined will make it about even as far as costs.
Of course the Oats will get the usual minerals and salt and all that when the feed is ground.
Losing the soybeans means a hell of a loss of protein. He will lose butter fat count no doubt. What he has to learn is not to give the same rations to the dry cows and the producing cows-that is something they taught him in the out of book ag school he went to. No reason to feed dry cows production cow feed...I.E ground feed. The kids were taught that it is easier to simply mix it altogether and feed it out. Kid is about to learn the old ways and his uncle will teach him.
Small dairy farmer will survive if they have any old timers around to show them.
The big grain and large dairy farmers are looking at hard times.
What a mess this POTUS has created. And he does not care.
And BTW. Pray for the right amount of rain.
Like you said, we will all get there, just have to re-learn how to do it.
Wont be no 180 to 200 ac bushel corn though...safe bet. I guess they have been getting that in Iowa.