Hello from South Central Wisconsin. Just like the weather for many of you, our weather here has been challenging for making quality hay and maintaining milk production. As we start to step out of summer and into fall, our producers and livestock will both welcome the cooler temperatures.
With that transition, we also have the opportunity to reflect on the challenges we have faced so far this year.
These challenges include low milk and grain prices, high input costs resulting in low margins for our fat cattle producers, and high land prices.
So, when you look across the country at land values and who is purchasing the land, how does a livestock, grain or dairy producer compete with other entities that do not rely on these prices and face the challenges we do every day?
In my area, and many parts of the country, we are facing corporate America purchasing farmland with more stable income sources to back them. They continue to treat these land purchases as investments rather than the valuable farmland that it is.
Across rural America and within our own organization, we are seeing the older generation trying to slow down, and these challenges make it tremendously difficult for the next generation to phase into these operations.
As the younger generation begins to transition into these farms, they discover that income from off-farm sources is the only way they will survive. In my opinion, this is not how the agriculture industry was meant to or should be.
To help combat the many challenges dairy, grain, and livestock producers face, it is as vital as ever to stay organized and to collaborate with your neighbors and other producers.
That’s why the organization developed marketing programs in the 1960s and early 1970s. They enabled farmers and ranchers to work together and group market their production. The organization established processor supply contracts which benefitted family farmers around the country.
Later, National Farmers developed cutting-edge price risk management programs in grain, dairy and livestock enabling producers to even out cashflows while protecting them from market volatility.
NFO has and will continue to preach the idea of collaboration, organization, and a sense of community as you sell the products of your toil. It is just as important or even more important now than it was 70 years ago when the National Farmers Organization began.
Every day as we face these trials, let’s continue to lean on one another and pray for a safe and bountiful harvest.
