2022 Was A Year Of Uncertainty For Grain Farmers

A grain market analyst on the prairies described 2022 as a year of uncertainty for prairie farmers.

Neil Townsend with Farmlink Marketing solutions says the Russian invasion nearly 11 months ago, was certainly a key market factor that no one could have imagined, even when the year began. "Certain things happened that you know probably weren't built into the models or built into expectations coming into 2022. The most notable of that was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the severity of that war, and the length of that war, which continues on to today. That being said, I think a lot of this sort of unfolded in a higher than typical price environment. If you go back over the 10 or last 15 years, we were in one of our higher ag commodity price regimes that we've seen now. I think the war set an expectation that we'd see a continuation of rising agricultural prices. Then almost contrary to that, we've seen very successful Russian production and Russian exports, and we've seen wheat prices not get back to the level levels that they were just in the immediate aftermath of the war. That leaves sort of a tinge of disappointment, but it sort of removes the focus from the fact that, overall, we've done pretty good with the prices. Now that's all occurred in a in an environment of inflation, higher interest rates, rising cost of inputs, so there are quite a few concerns when farmers are sort of penciling out next year (2023) about the higher costs."