Hawkeye Reporter

Lower yields expected in corn and soybeans in this year's harvest has some Iowa farmers thinking about getting out of the business, a Cedar Rapids newspaper recently reported.

"We've got a farm economy that could be unleashed and just crazy good," Vinton farmer Lance Lillibridge was quoted in an article published last month in The Gazette. "But we’ve got leaders in our government that are keeping that from happening. It’s very frustrating and that’s a bipartisan frustration, too - it's not one side or the other."

In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released forecasts in which the department lowered production estimates for corn, soybeans and cotton. Corn was expected to be down to 13.8 billion bushels and soybeans to 3.63 billion bushels, about a 1 percent drop from the department's August estimates.

Iowa State University Economist David Swenson | econ.iastate.edu

Lillibridge, who farms about 1,900 acres of corn, soybeans and alfalfa, in addition to a small herd of Red Angus cattle, told The Gazette that each harvest season brings "unknowns and a lot of anxiety,” but that this season is different.

Issues such as the ongoing trade war, tariffs and renewable fuel issues, in addition to 2019's delayed and disrupted growing season "gives everybody kind of a little bit of an upset stomach," Lillibridge said.

A large fraction of the nation's farm output is not operating at a profit, something that U.S. farmers cannot continue to do, Iowa State University Economist David Swenson said in The Gazette story.

"So it does create stress and it does create the probability that more of those operations are going to go under," Swenson was quoted in the news story. "That doesn't mean that we're going to lose that productivity from the land because somebody is going to turn right around and buy that land right back up and put it into production or keep it in production. But we do have that stress."