01/25/05 County loan rate concerns

01/25/05 County loan rate concerns

Farm and Ranch January 25, 2005 The USDA's county loan rates for 2005 soft white wheat in Whitman County, Washington dropped about 17 cents a bushel from 2004, while the loan rate for hard red spring and hard red winter wheat only dropped about a penny each. That has quality conscious wheat growers concerned. Randy Suess of Colfax is one of them and he explains why. Suess: "It would encourage farmers to grow the red wheat in a high rainfall area. So it would not be a good quality wheat then because we just have trouble making protein in that area. In exchange if farmers wanted to they could default it and get a 60-cent premium on those loan rates over soft white wheat. So I am afraid it is going to encourage farmers to grow wheats that shouldn't be grown in the Palouse. Now this isn't true really for a lot of the other areas of the state that are traditional red wheat growers, but it is for the higher rainfall areas of Whitman County." USDA uses a complicated formula to calculate the county loan rates and says its goal is to not distort the market. Suess: "And yet that is exactly the kind of situation they are creating in our county, is they are going to distort the market and encourage kinds of wheat to be grown there that really aren't traditional wheats to be grown there just because of the difference in the county loan rates." Growers are working with local USDA officials on the issue and have corresponded with members of Congress. The Washington Wheat Commission has even invited a USDA official in Washington D.C. to attend its March meeting to explain the determination of the new loan rates. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
Previous Report01/24/05 E.U. resumes wheat export subsidies
Next Report01/26/05 New Ag Secretary on Emerson Trust