As Vermilion County farmers look back on 2022, perhaps it’s a big sigh of relief that they had a solid harvest after all the worry going into the year about input costs, especially fertilizer. But as the Vermilion County Farm Bureau’s Tom Fricke points out, input costs will be a big concern in 2023 as well. For one thing, regular gasoline may be dropping in price a bit, but there’s another kind of fuel that isn’t dropping.
AUDIO: If you’ll notice, diesel prices are not. They’re staying in that five dollar range for over the road diesel. So the diesel prices for use on the farm are staying up as well. Farmers are big users of energy, both for equipment and drying down the grain.
As guest speaker Mark Gebhards talked about at the recent Vermilion County Farm Bureau dinner, there’s plenty to be concerned about overseas, especially in the China – Taiwan catergory. But as Fricke points out, there are millions, make that billions, in China that need to be fed. And if America’s role backs off in China, its role is bound to increase somewhere else.
AUDIO: Despite some of their challenges, and some of their actions; they’ve still got billions of people to feed, so there’s still going to be a market for somebody’s grain. If they end up buying from somebody else, then whoever they were selling to will be needing grain from someone. And America will be able to step in and fill those needs.
And when it comes to new developments in 2023, Fricke says don’t be shocked if the gung ho pace on land purchases and land price increases from the last few years slows down, due to the increase in interest rates.
AUDIO: I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw land sales leveling out, or maybe dipping a little bit. I’m not saying that they’re going to drop 50% or anything like that. But I could see some of the heat maybe being taken off of some of these land sales; with the increases in interest rates that we’ve seen this year.
Fricke says one thing to certainly be thankful for is all the technological improvements built into seeds by the seed companies over the years, which help insure a good yield even with some of the unpredictable weather patterns.
