Northern Concerns

Minnesota Crop Production Retailers (MCPR) members’ concerns this year are based upon two primary themes. One primary theme is “risk management.” Like the rest of the country, Minnesota’s ag retailers have been consolidating into larger companies and coops.

However, a common business threat exists that each must master regardless of size. The higher crop input pricing and supply concerns have forced more attention on risk exposure. In the past, the financial risk exposure was lower because of lower prices and more supply certainty. Sharing risk with the customer is an obvious solution to the business risk, but rural purchasing and agreements in the past have been based upon trust and phone calls among folks who have done business together for years. Now the stakes are much higher, the risk is overwhelming to some, and purchasing has to take on different, more business-like techniques. How to remain competitive and yet manage this risk demands much attention.

Dealing With Urbanization

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The other theme is a more “urbanized, city-focused culture” shaping the values in agricultural communities within which MCPR members operate. Every day, Minnesota ag retailers get inquiries from neighbors demanding to know what was sprayed on the field next to their house. Or we hear from a politician suspecting that their constituent’s cancer was caused by a “poison” that the guy in the floater has been applying to the farm for years … and are demanding “right-to-know” rules and laws to get more information on what is being injected into their environment.

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The fact is that the consolidation in agriculture is restricting the knowledge and understanding of modern production agriculture to fewer and fewer Minnesotans. The result is less tolerance and more accountability for actions and accidents. In fact, ag retailers report surprise that local community folks that once lived on farms themselves sometimes don’t have a realistic picture of what is involved these days in bringing the crops to market.

Dueling Visions

So we have competing visions of what farming should look like. One vision being peddled in the public marketplace of ideas is the local, sustainable, genetically pure organic farm community. In this view of the farmer’s future, all food and energy is produced, distributed, and sustained in local communities.

The competing view for those of us involved in production ag is a biotech crop that is produced in ever more efficient and effective means. By definition, this vision demands larger farms, equipment, ever more sophisticated bio engineered seed and crop inputs, and more effective transportation to get this produce to those that need it … primarily not in the farm communities in which MCPR members live.

The competition between these two visions of farming future is what is creating sleepless nights for those of us who must represent the ag retailers in a system getting less tolerant of our view of the future.

In my judgment, these two overriding themes are behind much of what challenges MCPR members this year. The risk we can learn to manage. However, like the rest of the country and around the world, we seem to be losing the public opinion battle for the vision of what farming “should be.”

 

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