Farmers escape blame

By BRAD DICKERSON
Glasgow Daily Times

GLASGOW June 20, 2008 07:10 pm

— Higher input and fuel costs are forcing area farmers to come up with ways to offset their growing expenses.
“Your actual row crop farmers are planting more acres to make do of what’s left of the squeeze,” said Jay Coleman, president of the Barren County Farm Bureau. “A lot of livestock producers are finding alternate rations, different formulations than they’ve ever used before.
“The Barren County farmers are a very diversified group of people.”
These costs, however, are of growing concern for agricultural leaders across the southern United States. They warned that many farmers could go out of business if solutions aren’t found, forcing the nation to import more food.
“I’ve had farmers in my state come to me in tears because they don’t know what they’re going to do,” Commissioner Ron Sparks of Alabama said during the annual conference of the Southern Association of State Departments of Agriculture, held in Lexington last week.
Coleman does not believe the country is in the midst of a food crisis, despite some national media reports to the contrary.
“There’s plenty of food that’s out there,” he said. “It just may be a little higher than what everybody wants to pay for it.”
As for higher food prices, Coleman said polls show that Americans do not blame farmers for the increase and that a panel of economists stressed that most individuals know farmers get a small percentage of the retail food dollar.
He added that most processed foods have very small amounts of farm commodities in them.
“An average-sized box of cornflakes (cereal) is somewhere in the $3 range,” Coleman said. “Well, inside that $3 box of cornflakes, if corn is $6 a bushel, there’s about eight or 10 cents worth of corn.”
That same box of cereal, Coleman said, also uses an abundance of high-priced fuel to be transported to the processing plant, then back to the distributor, then a grocery store.
“There’s more fuel cost in a box of cornflakes than there is corn,” Coleman said. “Your increased fuel cost, your increased labor cost – all that into these processed foods have amounted to more, really, than what the actual commodities in them.”
Although fuel and input costs have been the main concerns as of late, Coleman said there is another factor to consider — weather conditions.
“Hay supplies going out of last year were (at) record lows,” he said. “It’s very uncertain times.