MU Specialist Discusses Policy, Markets, Budgets at Crop Conference

Nov 13, 2024

Farmers and crop advisers attending the University of Missouri Extension Crop Conference will hear what to expect in agriculture in 2025. Ben Brown, MU Extension specialist in risk management, will look at what lies ahead in crop markets, input costs and agricultural policy during the Dec. 4-5 conference in Columbia.

Brown will review how crop markets changed over the past few months. “Commodity prices for U.S. grains and oilseeds have deteriorated from historically strong levels due to strong production in the United States and around the world,” Brown says. “The quantity demanded for commodities has expanded on lower prices, but the excess supply continues to weigh on prices received by producers.”

Brown also will give an overview of customizable row crop production budgets created by MU Extension. This includes separate budgets for southeastern Missouri. Enterprise budgets for 2025 show expectations for prices, production and input quantities. The 2025 budgets show a drop in fixed inputs like interest and machinery costs but increases in variable costs like seed and crop protection.

“Overall, the budgets estimate negative returns over total cost for Missouri producers,” says Brown. “For profitability to return to the sector, crop prices would need to increase, yields would need to be above average, or a combination of the two.”

Brown also looks ahead at changes in farm policy leadership. The Senate agriculture committee will have a new chairman and a new ranking member. There also will be a new Secretary of Agriculture who will likely lay out priorities he or she would like to see in a reauthorized farm bill.

Brown’s presentation is one of more than 15 offered by the state’s leading agricultural experts during the conference, says Kevin Bradley, MU Extension state weed scientist and longtime organizer of the event. The two-day event is Missouri’s premier agricultural conference for farmers and agricultural industry professionals to learn about timely topics.

The conference will be at a new location this year, the Columbia Hilton Garden Inn and Conference Center.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”