Farmers are not the only ones suffering from low commodity prices and a languishing farm bill. The Ag equipment industry is also taking a hit, which has some on Capitol Hill worried.
John Deere and Precision Planting in Illinois, Kinze in Iowa, and Ziegler Ag, with offices in Chicago, are all reducing their workforce or closing plants. Farmer and Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says the reason’s obvious. He says, “You can’t expect farmers to buy a lot of new equipment when corn is losing 50 or 60 dollars an acre. Some people are suggesting, maybe even a hundred dollars an acre. You just don’t have the income to buy this stuff.”
So, Grassley says Ag equipment makers are looking at history. He says, “All of these agriculture manufacturers know that they don’t want to make mistakes as they did in the 1980s and keep manufacturing and manufacturing and manufacturing when land prices are going down and farmers aren’t making any money from their crops.”
Grassley says a new farm bill isn’t a ‘magic wand,’ but it sure would help. He says, “It wouldn’t improve these prices overnight, but it’s the uncertainty of not having a farm bill, a five-year farm bill, that I think has made this (these) layoffs of workers in the agricultural manufacturing even worse than it would otherwise be.”
John Deere has laid off several hundred workers at plants in Illinois and Iowa, Kinze, almost 200 at its Iowa headquarters in Williamsburg, while Ziegler Ag closes plants in Wisconsin and Missouri.
All this as USDA forecasts a 25 percent or more drop in farm income this year.
Story by Matt Kaye/Berns Bureau; courtesy of NAFB News Service