By
Bill Beggs Jr.
Get up before dawn, feed and water the livestock, go back inside
for a hearty breakfast made from the fruits of your labor, then
climb on the combine and start working the north forty. After
lunch, keep working the land until after the sun goes down.
Plant, harvest, sell. Not that simple, of course; never was.
But today it’s riskier than ever.
Some may only be aware of the plight
of the American farmer through the Farm Aid concerts that brought
the crisis into the spotlight beginning in the mid-1980s. Federal
subsidies have been necessary to keep countless farms solvent.
But this has never been a guarantee. Recently the Bush Administration
announced plans to cut subsidies, which was met with a weary
shrug by at least one cotton farmer in the Missouri bootheel
quoted in early February by the Post-Dispatch.
When it’s time to decide what to plant, or what are the next
steps once the harvest is in, then what? Do it like it’s been
done for generations? Only at your peril.
The hardware is much the same: tractor, irrigation equipment,
barns and silos. But to compete in the 21st century, state-of-the-art
technology is essential for any producer to compete, whether
his goods originate in a vineyard close to San Francisco or
a soybean producer between nowhere and central Illinois.
In a word: software. Some can be accessed via websites, more
is available off the shelf.
For instance, what does an independent cattleman need to compete
against the huge corporate beef producer just across the county
line—or south of the equator in Argentina or Brazil? He could
take advantage of the Replacement Cow Decision Tool: in plain
English, the CowCulator, which evaluates the decision to purchase
a replacement beef heifer using long-range beef prices. It answers
the question: “How much can I pay?”
This and many other features useful to raisers and growers are
available through the Food and Agricultural Policy Institute
at the University of Missouri at Columbia: FAPRI. It’s right
there at www.fapri.missouri.edu/farmers_corner,
under “Software Tools.”
“We’ve designed tools specifically for producers, tools they
might not normally have access to—a budget generator and a calculator,”
says Lori Wilcox, market/policy analyst with FAPRI, a joint
venture with Iowa State University.
Once registering at FAPRI, farmers can download other useful
aids for marketing decisions—as the classic Country song goes,
You gotta know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em:
• Grain Store/Sell Decision Aid—Estimates
costs of handling and storing dry grain in on-farm or commercial
storage for use in making marketing decisions
• Crop Budget Generator—Helps build customized
crop budgets and evaluates leases, pre-loaded budgets for 2007
Missouri crops: Soybeans, corn, corn silage, double-crop beans,
wheat, straw and grain sorghum
• Forage Budget Generator—Helps build
customized forage budgets and includes pre-loaded budgets for
alfalfa, crabgrass, fescue seed, fescue-ladino, and orchardgrass-red
clover. This estimates costs of production for seed, pasture,
small square bales, large round bales, and/or haylage
This is akin to having the County Extension Office on your desktop.
But the agent needn’t have to be pulled in 15 directions at
once, meanwhile fielding calls and visiting properties to help
farmers handle crises of the day or sort through the challenges
of the season.
A farmer today, rather than call the neighbor down the road
or hop in the truck and drop in, can e-mail him. Or, share successes
and failures on a blog.
Producer connectivity is growing by leaps and bounds, which
has huge implications for marketers and agribusinesses, says
Kip Pendleton, president of AgriStar Global Networks. AgriStar
develops satellite systems to make broadband connections available
for producers (read: farmers) and the companies that serve them.
Companies’ field networks need ongoing training, and critical
business applications may continually need updating. Commodity
organizations need ways to communicate easily and regularly
with officers and members. And producers want everything from
the latest prices to breaking news and the most detailed weather
information possible.
These days, a farmer needs to add software engineer and commodity
broker to his skill set—or, know how to find such expertise,
often ASAP. Generations of farm families know they can’t be
too prepared for a tornado or flood. Or a drought, literally
and figuratively.
AgriStar touts a philosophy geared to the new era of market
volatility, where global information travels rapidly—which could
mean an overnight windfall or disaster to your bottom line,
depending on how well you’re prepared. International events,
which previously took weeks to work their way through a particular
commodity market, now do so in a matter of hours, making it
financially risky to attempt to “call the market” on a short-term
basis, company officials say.
Blogging is bread and butter for Chuck Zimmerman, ZimmComm Marketing
& Communications. Zimmerman has offered workshops to ag audiences
on the ins and outs of blogging, what it can and can’t do and
what it could mean for the farmer’s well-being. His company’s
numerous blogs include ongoing dialogues for dairy producers
and farmers interested or involved in renewable fuel sources.
One of Zimmerman’s recent posts was about Country legend Merle
Haggard gettin’ on the bus for biofuels—literally. When asked
what attracted him to the renewable fuel source, Haggard’s answer
was: “The smell.” Like many a kid nauseated by the fumes wafting
through the school bus windows, Haggard doesn’t like the smell
of burning diesel. Haggard also said he’s happy that the development
of biodiesel is helping American farmers.
You can sing that again, Merle. Now, how ’bout writing us a
song about the BioBelt?
Our region, so dubbed because it’s smack-dab in the middle of
millions of acres of corn and soybeans, is geographically blessed
to be a research center. Monsanto Co. is studying ways to improve
the supply and quality of corn and soybeans—used to produce
biofuels—as well as exploring ways to enhance products for biofuel.
Meanwhile, across Olive Boulevard at the Donald Danforth Plant
Science Center, research is humming both in biofuels and in
ways to develop drought- and disease-resistant plant strains—more
acreage of healthy plants means a greater abundance of raw materials
for producing ethanol.
In and of itself, the very name of one regional research center
could be an argument-settler: The National Corn-to-Ethanol Research
Center, based at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
All of this and more bodes well for America’s farmers.
Remember the fellow in his combine who was working the north
forty at the opening of this article? Don’t let the coveralls
and feed-company cap fool you. In between rows, he’s been keeping
up with soybean futures on CNBC and blogging on his BlackBerry.
