From Bloomberg, August 30:
First U.S. Farm-Income Gain in Four Years Signals Hope of Bottom
U.S. farmer net income is forecast to rise this year for the first
time since 2013, suggesting a bottom to an agriculture slump that left
profit at half of the peak.
Producers of crops, livestock and dairy products may net $63.4 billion
in 2017, up 3.1 percent from a revised $61.51 billion in 2016, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture said Wednesday in a report on its website.
Much of the increase came from sales of inventory in grain bins and
higher revenue from livestock and milk.
“We’re sitting in this
spot where we’ve seen things leveled out,” Chad Hart, an agricultural
economist at Iowa State University in Ames, said in a telephone
interview. “We’re treading water. Things aren’t getting worse, but
they’re not getting better. The question is: Is this just a pause before
we work our way back up, or are we waiting for the next step down?”
Signs of stability have returned to the farm economy. Farmland values
may rise 2.3 percent following the 0.3 percent decline in 2016, USDA
data showed. Cash receipts from chicken broilers and hogs were forecast
to increase 15 percent with cattle up 5.7 percent, the agency said.
Two
key measures of farm health, debt-to-equity and debt-to-asset ratios,
will be little changed in 2017. That reflects the strong balance sheets
of many farms that have had the same owner for decades, Hart said....MORE
