A look at Farm Economy

David Sparks Ph.D.

So it's definitely not in the worst ever category, right? So the 1980s, you had multiple things affecting farmers at once. You had lower incomes, you had higher interest rates, higher debt loads, all hitting at one time. Today we do have lower incomes, no doubt about it. That ranks among the top stresses in the in the historical ag agricultural economy in the United States. But we have very low interest rates and the debt loads have been really following the asset base. So debt has not really increased as a percentage of assets, making it very manageable. So the lower interest rate environment is really been the difference maker and gets me a lot more comfortable that we can manage these debt loads as a sector into 2020 and beyond.

I think we should continue to see a little bit of tightening. We might see a few more sales on the market. Looking at the ad lender survey, the twenty nineteen twenty twenty ad lenders survey that's put out by Farmer Mac and the APA. We noticed an uptick in expectations. So lenders expect more land to come on the market and more land to close. So they're thinking that there's gonna be a pickup.