Low confidence for livestock producers

I talked with DTN Editor-In-Chief Greg Horstmeier. "This is one of the trends that we saw it coming out this time which was a new thing. Historically, when crop farmers were optimistic back in the 2011 through 2013 days when crop prices were good, our scores were in the 150’s and 160’s for extreme optimism in the crop world, livestock producers were understandably pessimistic because grain prices high, feed prices high. So livestock and crop farmers tended to go in the opposite direction. When the crop prices started to come back down and the index for crop farmers started to move closer to the pessimistic side of the range, livestock farmers tended to move back into the optimistic range because they were paying less for feed and animal prices were still pretty good and milk prices were good. What we see now is a reflection of what has happened, particularly in the cattle and dairy industry with some of the wide fluctuations that have gone on in cattle futures prices which has completely upset the apple cart in terms of cash sales, what farmers can expect and ranchers can expect to get for their cattle when they take them to tell. Huge swings their so a lot of uncertainty there. And then in the dairy market, especially milk prices are globally at a very low rate. We hear the problems with dairy profitability both here in the United States and all the way across the globe”. Which does not bode well for Idaho given the huge number of dairy producers that we have.