9-28 NWR Farmers and Finance

9-28 NWR Farmers and Finance

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
This is your Northwest report for Wednesday, September 28th, I'm David Sparks and the fiscal picture for farmers is in the news. In view of low commodity prices and the fact that many farmers are below breakeven, the ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson said recently that it will be the performance of the farm economy through this coming fall and winter that will determine whether Congress will need to step in with assistance or perhaps even move in to writing a new farm bill early. Sterling Liddell, Senior Vice President for Rabo AgriFinance was asked how would we evaluate the performance of the farm economy to know whether it's time to call on Washington to step up. "What we need to be very cautious in looking at things that we have looked at in the past as evaluating the farm economy. Often in the past we have looked at debt to asset ratios and different types of balance sheet ratios and said, the farm economy looks great and debt to asset ratio is in good shape. What we really need to start looking at is the ability to cover the debt that farms have accrued. Can they generate liquidity from production activities to cover the interest payments that they have to make and be able to secure financing going into the next year. So we need to monitor what is happening at that income generation level and determine whether or not farmers are able to go into this next year and actually finance."

The recently retired deputy administrator for foreign service operations of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Daryl Brehm will speak at the University of Idaho on Oct. 5 on "Agriculture and American Foreign Policy".

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