Farmers and inflation

Revered agricultural economist Dr. Garth Taylor talks inflation in farming. " I want your listeners to look at them in the mirror and say, When was the last time you paid 16% on your operating loans? It is not just diesel fertilizer roundup and it is a general inflation in the types of all of their inputs, including their operating loans and all those types of things. Now, how is it going to affect agriculture? Well, it was devastating then and it will be devastating now. They have far cleaner balance sheets, farmers than in the eighties. There was a survey and farmers complained about the effects of drought. I did a little informal survey and there wasn't one single lender that came in and said, We've got farmers that are looking for money to drought. Wow. They complain about it, but they're not seeing their banker about those types of things. They've got clean balance sheets going into this and whether they can face that illusion of making more money when they're not making more money, that's another story. The other thing I'll answer a question for you in the future is how this is going to affect food prices in the United States. My story with that, David, is that what you're seeing is farmers hate the number. It's about five pennies on every loaf of bread that goes to the wheat farmer. They hate that. So if you double the price of wheat, it goes to $0.10 in a loaf of bread, another nickel in a $2 loaf of bread. That isn't going to hurt the consumers in the United States. Speaker1: But farmers are a different matter.