Ag Students Risk Management

What future farmers can learn in the College of Business and Economics? I was talking with you, advised College of Business and Economics professor Dr. Terry Girebe about the AG students who attend his classes, and he listed some of the wonderful skills that they can acquire.

Risk management has become a critical component of all of the different parts of the ag industry. Farm to fork, as is often said, and it begins with the local producer. When you are in a commodities based world, you have to think about the value that you can provide and how you protect yourself from price swings and things that you can't control. And that is not part of the value that you're providing. And that's true for the grower. It's true for the crusher, the producer distributor all the way up and down the value chain. That's the thing that I'm really the most excited about in terms of the collaboration that we're seeing between the college business in economics and the College of Agriculture is that we're bringing that perspective to a lot of different parts of the market and in particular with the agriculture side. It's happening in both colleges. It's truly a collaboration. If you're a farmer and you have an appropriate use of hedging in the commodity markets so that you have a great deal of certainty about what your balance sheet in your income statement is going to look like at the end of the year. If you take that to the bank, you're going to get a lot better rate, a lot more access to capital, a lot more flexibility in someone who isn't controlling that risk and then can't say for sure what their results are going to look like.

Dr. Gree was very complimentary about the kinds of students coming out of the College of Agriculture.