High cash rents to squeeze Midwest grain farmers in 2014
Rents on prime U.S. crop land are expected to stay high in 2014 despite a sharp drop in grain prices, raising financial pressure on farmers who rent most of their land and risk big losses in the coming year, analysts and bankers say.
More than half the 250 million acres (101 million hectares) of corn, soybean and wheat land in the United States, the world's biggest grain exporter, are rented. Negotiations on 2014 farm land leases are going on in the Corn Belt and Great Plains, with farmers, absentee owners and their farm managers, and farm lenders all penciling out projected grain growing profits and losses.
"With the recent drop in crop prices and the stickiness of land rents not falling as quickly as crop prices, many farmers are feeling the squeeze once again between revenue, costs and rent," said Kent Olson, an economist at the University of Minnesota.
That is a marked difference from five years of record or near-record farm income driven by record demand for biofuels and exports, capped with record grain prices in 2012 during the worst U.S. drought in 50 years. Now things have changed. The record large U.S. harvest in 2013 bins has dropped grain prices 30 percent in six months.
Bottom-line estimates for growing corn in 2013 in northern Illinois, for instance, now project a loss of $81 an acre compared to net gains of $188 an acre in 2012 and $251 in 2011, according to farm economist Gary Schnitkey of the University of Illinois.
For 2014, projections based on current costs and prices pencil out to a loss of $53 an acre for corn, he says. The outlook is similar in Iowa and Minnesota, which with Illinois produce more than a third of all U.S. corn and soybeans.
The problem for renters, though, is two-fold. Lease rates almost always lag drops in grain prices as landowners see what the market will bear. And farmers usually chase land prices for fear of losing the acreage in future to some other neighbor who will risk and pay more....MORE
