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Hart: short-term bearish, long-term bullish on ag outlook

An ag economics professor says the agricultural outlook for 2020 is looking to be similar to 2019.

Chad Hart, with Iowa State University, says he is short-term bearish when considering the outlook for 2020.  

“When we’re looking at weather patterns, they’re setting up very similar, when we look at the struggles in the international marketplace they’re setting up to be similar as well,” he says.

But, he says he is long-term bullish and growers will have opportunities with production and marketing crops.

“When we get to that spring price, we do see some opportunities to lock in some profitable margins and I think we’ll see that again here in 2020,” he says. “The biggest challenge is getting farmers to take advantage of those opportunities. We need to bump that up a little bit in order to improve our farm finances.”

Hart says trade disputes have slowed global incomes and lowered demand and he believes that will takes some time to build back up. He believes things will begin picking back up in 2022.

Brownfield spoke to Hart during the Purdue University Top Farmer Conference.

Audio: Chad Hart, Iowa State University