Midwest Agriculture Conference: Opening Remarks

LESLIE MCGRANAHAN: OK, so we're going to go ahead and get started. So, good morning. I'm Leslie McGranahan. Look, my picture. I'm Senior Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank Chicago, and I'm excited to welcome everyone here in Chicago and online to our 20th Annual Midwest Agriculture Conference.

So, shortly after this fall's harvest race to the finish line, it's a good time to assess agriculture's current situation and where it's headed. So today, we'll delve into a timely conference theme, the changing landscape for agricultural inputs.

Although dryness spread across the region for much of the latter half of the growing season, timely rains pushed corn and soybean production to record highs for most of the Midwest. With corn and soybean prices much lower than a year ago, due to projected near record us harvests and robust international crops, revenues from the combined corn and soybean harvest will be under 2023's level, which is already substantially lower than 2022's record total.

The livestock sector has been doing better overall, yet not all types of livestock operations have performed well. And livestock producers were squeezed by higher input costs for feed, when crop prices rose dramatically from 2020 to 2022.

With revenues under pressure, cost minimization has become more of a focus for farm operations. So holding down input costs offers a pathway to higher profitability, making this an appropriate time to evaluate shifts related to agricultural inputs for Midwest farming.

So every farm needs a myriad of inputs to function, and recent years, there have been numerous modifications to the structure of input markets. The lay of the land for farm inputs has evolved as technological, financial and competitive factors have brought change.

So today's conference will explore these issues with morning sessions titled Agricultural Inputs and Market Shifts and Key Topics Related to Farm Inputs, featuring economists from the USDA and from leading Midwestern research universities.

Then we'll have a fireside chat between my colleague David Oppedahl and Matt Carstens, President and CEO of Landus Cooperative, which is a leading seller of agricultural inputs in Iowa that also has a broad international reach.

This afternoon, there'll be a panel of experts on financing agricultural inputs moderated by Nate Kauffman, just saw a moment ago, Senior Vice President, Economist and Omaha Branch Executive from our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The program will conclude with some remarks from Fed President Austan Goolsbee.

So for 20 years now, this event has been bringing together agricultural participants to discuss timely agricultural topics. Farming is a vital part of the economy of our district, which encompasses the entire state of Iowa and the majority of both the land and population of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.
 
So in addition to this annual conference, we also show our dedication to district farming through our quarterly AgLetter publication, which focuses on understanding what's happening on the ground with farmland values and agricultural credit conditions. The AgLetter has been published since, remarkably, the 1940s, featuring analysis based on surveys of district agricultural lenders.

Right now, we're seeing the growth in the value of farmland stalling. So according to our most recent survey, agricultural land values in the district were the same in the third quarter of 2024 as a year ago--
--which is the first quarter where there hasn't been a year over year increase in district farmland values since late 2019. So this change in the picture for land values is another reason why today's discussion about farm inputs is timely.

I'm looking forward to an engaging and informative conversation. To get our conversation started, I would like to ask David Oppedahl to come up to introduce our first session. David guides the Chicago Fed's agricultural research, writes the AgLetter, along with senior research analyst, Elizabeth Kepner, and organized today's conference.

David has a remarkable ability to identify timely and important topics to highlight at this annual event, and the topic this year is no exception. So again, welcome, everybody, and thank you for attending, and bring David up.
 
DAVID OPPEDAHL: Thanks, Leslie. And let me add my welcome, as well. So, we are looking forward to a first session with Kate Vaiknoras as our first presenter, so she can go ahead and come on up. And then Brian Briggeman will be next.

Kate is a research agriculture economist for the Economic Research Service from USDA. And there's going to be a big announcement by the ERS today about crop and everything for farm income and stuff, so that'll be interesting. In the middle of the conference we can all be checking it that out. So, thanks for coming.
 
KATE VAIKNORAS: Thank you.