At Friday’s Purdue Top Farmer Conference there were presentations on the political landscape with the new Congress in DC, AI and new technology. But always lurking for farmers is the challenge of turning a profit. (AE says that will be difficult in 2025.)
“The prospects right now do not look very good,” says Michael Langemeier, Director at the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, which hosts the conference each year. He says the ag economy barometer says it all. For months it has highlighted high input costs and low commodity prices.
“We’re living with the high input costs that we’ve had the last 3 years,” he said. “It just seems to stay up there, and so the break-even prices are substantially higher than what they were in 2021 and before that, and so along with that we’ve got relatively low corn and soybean prices and so it’s a classic case where the earnings are negative, or the economic profit is negative, or the break-even prices are higher than the price. That’s probably going to continue through at least ’25, perhaps into ‘26.”…