MANTUA, Ohio — For Ohio farmers like Portage County's Chuck Sayre, these winter days are in no way downtime. His fields may not need his attention just yet, but his equipment does.
“We spend the winter months maintaining what we have and putting repairs into it,” he said.
That's important because the tractor they’re working on this day they purchased for about a half million dollars a few years back; it would cost close to a million today to replace.
"And so it's doubled in price, but what we get back for our crop is going down — it's not going up,” said Sayre.
Farmers in Ohio got less for their crops in 2023, and they're going to get even less in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a drop of possibly 25% or more at a time when the cost to grow their crops keeps going up.
"Profit wise, we're at an all time low for what we're selling vs. what we're spending,” said Sayre. “And every month, the past two months, it's going down and down and down. We don't know where the bottom is. For what we sell our grain for, the prices are going down and down on a daily basis.”
And the folks at the Ohio Farm Bureau say he is not alone in having to make adjustments.
"Things are going to have to change on the farm this year; there is going to be a tightening of the belt, so to speak, across Ohio agriculture,” said Ohio Farm Bureau’s Ty Higgins.
A number of factors are to blame, he said — supply and demand, cost and logistics impacting the all-important foreign markets, along with foreign trade deals themselves.
"We need to find more trade partners across the globe,” Higgins said. “There are things that we need to be doing politically and on the trade front in order to help farmers get past 2024 and be able to see a profit in years to come."
Sayre added, “the people that buy our products, China and other countries that buy our global product, they can buy it cheaper from other countries and those other countries don't have the mandates that we have, diesel fuel regulations and fertilizer regulations and all of those things so they can buy on a world market, they can buy other places cheaper,” he said. “As Americans, we can't compete with what's happening globally.”
There are two W's that often impact farmers: weather and Washington. Since 2018, we have chronicled the Sayre Farm's battle with both: the China Tariff war of 2018 that greatly impacted the U.S. soybean market, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the spike in petroleum that came along with it impacting the cost of everything from the diesel they need to run their tractors to the fertilizer needed to treat their crops. Like any farmer, though, they are nothing if not resilient.
"Farming has always been a roller coaster, it's always been up and down and farmers understand that," Sayre said. But that being said, “we didn't expect what we're getting paid for the crop to be so low, so we're going to have to start making adjustments."
