US FARM CRISIS
[JEREMY GUSTAFSON FARMER]So my name is Jeremy Gustafson. I'm a farmer in Iowa,
right in the middle. My hometown is Boone. We raise corn and soybeans here.
[Jeremy]So some issues that are different this year than in years past is that with all
the things going on in the world today, our input costs have almost doubled.
[David]Nitrogens, between double and
triple. Depending on the form of nitrogen. It’s…
[David]It's been interesting. Next year is the one that's gonna be difficult. We're running off old
inventory. Supply chain issues is what we're told because of COVID, the overreaction to the COVID thing,
it caused a lot of supply chain problems.
[David]And that's what they're telling us we're seeing.
[David] I don't know. I think it's greed.
[David]But whatever.
[Joe]If everything would stabilize, it will help. It's… How do I want to say it?
[Joe]Very risky. Very risky right now.
[Joe]For example, you could have two farmers living one right across the road from each other,
[JOE KRIEGEL FARMER]and they each operate just a little bit different. If one
of them lucky enough to sell his priced bar enough ahead at a good price. And
the other one doesn't… One can go broke. And the other one don’t. It's gonna be
really hard for everybody to keep going. Some will make it some of them won't.
[Correspondent]So your heritage is…
[Nolan]Yeah, Swedish as well. Yeah. So, they came from Sweden and… In Sweden I believe our last name was Peterson.
[NOLAN PATTERSON FARMER]And then, when they come here, then changed it to Patterson.
[Nolan]Just because I think there was too many Petersons. I know the first Patterson moved here,
like in 1865 and then Bobby didn't stake his claim until, you know, into the 1870s. And
then I think he jumped on his horse and rode to Boone to stake his claim then anyways.
[Nolan]It was kind of interesting.
[Nolan]So it goes back a long way. So, yep...
[David]Since the 1800s, I guess… Late
1800s, we homesteaded some ground.
While where I lived, that was… I
don't… 1889, 1887, something like that.
[DAVID OLSON FARMER]Up through now, my dad farms and uncles, and…
[David]Just been around here forever. Kinda hard to get away from it.
[Jeremy]I want a dirty tractor for a backdrop. Okay. So in the state of Iowa, they give awards to
farms that have been in the family for a hundred years or 150 years. So this is the award we got
in 1976. My grandfather, Roy, got it for having the farm for a hundred years in the family. And
we'll be coming up here in just a couple years now on our 150 years of this being a family farm.
[Joe]Everything is so expensive right now.
The main reason is because of the cost of fuel.
[Joe]That drives the cost of everything up.
[Joe]The difference in the price of what the farmer gets for the grain... It
seems like it's a high price, but when you take that in consideration, what
all the inputs, the equipment and all that stuff, actually, our grain prices
are not high enough to keep up with what all of our inputs are costing us.
[Robert]Gas price, as far as reasons for it go.
[Robert]Our current
[ROBERT STREIT AGRONOMIST, CENTRAL IOWA AGRONOMICS]lame duck president is blaming Russia
for that. And he doesn't realize that if you
could explore oil resources in the US and
Canada, and you shut down pipelines.
[Robert]If you make doing business so prohibitively expensive or so time-consuming to file for the right permits
and filling new forms out all the time. Your gas
companies are going to get blamed for the problem, but
they're not the problem, they would like to maximise
output. So Biden really can't blame Putin for causing
the problem because he himself caused the problem.
In his campaign speeches, he was trying to pander to
his woke crowd and he said, “There's no room
for fossil fuel in this administration if I'd get elected.”
[Robert]So, my plan on that, which if I was king I would
do, I would have everyone that voted for Don Trump get to
buy fuel for $2 a gallon less, and everyone that voted
for Biden pay $2 more for fuel. So that'd be my solution.
[Joe]What we need to do — the United States needs to do
is, start drilling our oil again. We can drill for oil. And for some reason, our government thinks that we shouldn't be using
our own oil, which is crazy. You got the environmentalists and all that, trying to stop it.
[Joe]So what do we do? I don't think electric cars is gonna solve the problem.
[Joe]How do you make the electricity? Wind mills? Wind has to blow
for the windmills to work. What do you do when the wind doesn’t blow?
[David]But to say that we're gonna work off solar or battery technology that we have now, I
don't think we got the capacity to do the work we're doing with what is available. You still have
to have the source of electricity to charge your battery or your capacitor or whatever system
you're using. It's either that or you burn diesel fuel and turn the generator to make the energy.
[Jeff]The fertilisers… A lot of the commercial or conventional fertilisers are what really is…
[JEFF BURESH OWNER, BRT AG & TURF]went very high this year.
[Jeff]So, this is urea. So, this is 46% nitrogen. That has more than
doubled that it was last year. The process to make this is using…
does use natural gas. So, that’s the main reason that is higher.
[David]People that have farmed their land for the long time, they generally have a surplus of fertilisers in their soil.
[David]It’s, I don’t know, kinda like money in the bank, I guess you’d call it.
[David]And you could minimise inputs for a few years, but it’ll come back to haunt you
eventually, if you don’t try to keep up. When you put fertiliser on the land,
it generally takes 4-5 years before you start to realise any benefits from it,
[DAVID OLSON FARMER]because it is a mineral, and it takes the microbes in
the soil to break it down so plants can use it. So yeah… it’s available.
[David] The nitrogen is the only thing that’s gotta be replaced
every year. And finding a source for nitrogen has been the hurdle.
[Jeremy]Nitrogen — it’s sorta like a gas engine of the plant. That gives you your height,
it gives you your size, and it makes your plant healthy, so you can put a good year on.
[Jeff]The potassium chloride — that’s more than doubled also. And we
believe that’s more due to energy, or just because they can raise it.
[Jeff]Because it shouldn’t have caused the companies twice as much to
produce that same tonne of fertiliser as it did, you know, in the past.
[Robert]So I think what it was is typically John Deere and Monsanto are always
competing to see who can extract $100 an acre from each farmer that’s raising
corn. So it looked to me like the fertiliser industry wanted to get in the frontal
line to see if they could extract $200 an acre from the fertiliser expense.
[Robert]And that’s what they did this year.
[Robert]As we know, every society that has degraded its soil, doesn’t treat it right ends up failing,
because they lost their food supply. Hungry people riot and they overthrow governments.
[Jeff]So as far as the end user, so the general public buying, you know, a lot
of this food, basically because the food comes a lot from the corn and soy beans,
even if it’s fed through the animals, you know, beef, pork, poultry, fish. I’ve
noticed in the grocery store that a lot of these prices are up to 25–30% already.
[Jeff]And with high fertiliser and energy prices, you know,
they will stay high. With the fertilizer being twice as high as
what it is normally that probably alone adds, you know, 10
or 15% to the cost of that product going in the grocery store.
[Jeff]So for, so this is affecting everyone,
obviously. I mean, everyone needs to eat
and, you know, costs in the groceries store are going to be increased.
[Jeremy]So, so yeah, for next year, things could dramatically change if we don't see input,
if we don't see our commodity prices stay high. Cause our input prices have already gone up,
fertilizer and chemicals, have dramatically risen. Fuel has dramatically risen and right
now, it’s, it's a waiting list. If you need to replace machinery, basically, it's really hard
[JEREMY GUSTAFSON FARMER]to get your hands on any kind of new or used machinery. Probably
one of the bigger issues right now is getting our hands on tires, a certain size of
tires. We've had a hard time when it's, I mean, when it's time to replace a tire, you don't,
can't just sit back and wait. It's time to replace a tire. You gotta put a new one on.
[Robert]In the area of machine parts, if a farmer has a $500,000
combine with a $150,000 head on it, and he's missing a $5
part that was made in China, and they don't have that part
in the country. It doesn't sound like a good idea to have it.
[Robert]So that machine has to set and his crop doesn't get combined before the heavy snows hit.
[ROBERT STREIT AGRONOMIST, CENTRAL IOWA AGRONOMICS]So we've
in this country, our political leaders, have been spineless
and they allowed a lot of manufacturing to be offshored
and oftentimes in countries that aren't always friendly to us.
[Joe]Part of our machinery is very bad. Used equipment
is getting expensive because new, you can't buy new.
[Jeff]So what we're doing here is making reverse osmosis water
and we use reverse osmosis water for some of our fertilizer,
products that we make as well as some of our compost tees. This,
this tote is, has, is full of worms that we're using to make worm
castings, and basically get this composted mix ready to be used
for compost tea extract. This replaces for the spring planting
application, what farmer would be paying $30 an acre for, this is
gonna cost them about 12. So that's where the cost savings comes in.
[JEFF BURESH OWNER, BRT AG & TURF]So yeah, that's why we're doing it. Yep.
[Jeff]So what we're doing here is using the GOT-250 machine to take dry
compost or a dry compost blend that has different ingredients in it - like worm
castings and folic and humic acids and different food sources for the biology.
We're putting it in this tea bag or whatever, and then bubbling water through it.
[Jeff]We latch it.
[Jeff]Basically, what it does is you're reinoculating the soil with these bacteria and fungi, and that
bacteria and fungi are loosening up or making some of that unavailable nutrients available to the plant.
[Jeff] It makes everything work better. It puts more air in the soil,
put some more water in the soil. It just makes the plants thrive.
[Joe]Another thing we're gonna do this year is we're gonna use
foliar on the corn. That is a nitrogen fixing bacteria. And for like
15 or $20 an acre, we think, we can get 45 to 50 pounds of nitrogen,
which is about half the price of, of nitrogen right now. I mean,
[JOE KRIEGEL FARMER]I think that's the things we're gonna have to start doing in the future, and I
do believe there will be a lot of people starting to do that in the future. If these prices stay up.
[Robert]Farmers will find a way to survive. [Robert]They always have.
[Robert]There's some difficulty in it, but we'll see more manufacturing come back
and we'll get through it.