Initial Grower Sentiment Indicates Positive 2021 Season

Now that we are almost through the first month of 2021 – and one month closer to spring – I’ve started seeing plenty of stories online about grower confidence in the upcoming growing season. For the most part, these surveys indicate the nation’s growers are feeling that 2021 will be a “better year” for agriculture, if for no other reason than much of the uncertainty surrounding 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. Presidential Election seems to be subsiding somewhat.

Perhaps aiding in this positive outlook, commodity prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat have all started on upward trends. This is being helped along, of course, by the early January USDA carryover stocks report, which indicated the nation’s carryover crop surplus was much smaller for these major row crops than was originally projected during the latter months of 2020.

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And overall, this “positive outlook” jibes with the finding from the 2020 CropLife 100 survey of the nation’s top ag retailers, which CropLife magazine presented in its December 2020 edition. Looking at 2021, the outlook for the year ahead among CropLife 100 ag retailers seemed fairly positive. According to the 2020 CropLife 100 survey, slightly more than half of respondents (55%) say that their grower-customers are “cautiously optimistic” that the 2021 growing season will be a good one for their farming operations. One percent went so far as to call their grower-customers “very optimistic” for the prospects of profitability in 2021.

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For the other 44% of respondents, the outlook for 2021 is a little less rosy. According to the 2020 survey, 39% of CropLife 100 ag retailers that their grower-customers are “somewhat pessimistic” for 2021 to be a strong profit year for their operations. The remaining 5% say that their grower-customers are “very pessimistic” for the chance to make money this year.

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