The farm economy continues to falter according to ag economists, but at least one ag senator sees a silver lining. Iowa’s Chuck Grassley is one of just two farmers in the US Senate and agrees with many ag economists, the farm economy is on the brink of, or already in a recession.
He says, “The only good news in an Ag recession is, it’s not a depression.”
The Ag Economist’s August Monthly Monitor by the University of Missouri found more than half of 70 economists surveyed said the farm economy is now in a recession. Corn prices are at a four-year low, USDA forecasts record drops in net farm income of nearly $40 billion this year, $30 billion last year…and there’s still no farm bill.
But Grassley says there is one ‘silver lining’; “Recent years, 75-percent of the land has been paid for, unlike in the 1980s when we had an agricultural depression…only 25-percent of the land was paid for.” And Grassley says that was a time of foreclosures and human tragedy with “suicides by American farmers…people right here in the neighborhood of New Hartford, Iowa, where I’ve lived for 90-years.”
Grassley says it’s sad that farmers get just two good years out of every six or seven, but adds they’ve “wised up” since the ‘80s. He says in part, “that you’ve got to preserve money for a rainy day. Those rainy days are on us.”
Story by Matt Kaye/Berns Bureau; courtesy of NAFB News Service
