Why Purdue Survey Shows Farmer Sentiment Improved

Despite a wave of negative news, the March Purdue University, CME Group, ag economy barometer shows farmer sentiment improved on Purdue's ag cast economist Michael Langemeier said tight margins, rising input costs and higher financial risk are still shaping decisions, keeping producers cautious, but he made note of what is offsetting the month's pessimism.

“But there was other factors going on here, and one of them that we didn't talk about in the report-

that's obviously was going on as the bridge payments were going out. And the bridge payments, if you average those for a corn soybean farm, were about $35 per acre, and so they were rather sizable, and so that probably boosted sediment but also if you look at corn and soybean prices, particularly corn prices, corn prices were up if you look at the time we surveyed in March compared to the time we surveyed it in February. And one of the interesting things about corn prices is it's not perfectly correlated with energy prices, but it is positively correlated with energy prices. And so because the energy prices went up, corn prices went up a little bit, and I think that offsets some of the negativity regarding the higher energy and fertilizer prices. Another thing I think is important to point out is a lot of producers probably already had purchased their fertilizer. And so this isn't going to be quite as much impact

for those people,”

But for those who have not, the impact of the war with Iran will be significant when it comes to profits and losses.