Farmers are feeling the sting of inflation as they pay significantly higher prices for crop seeds, weed-killing chemicals, fertilizer, equipment repairs, and seasonal labor, reports the Wall Street Journal. These costs have not only eroded profits from last year’s rising crop prices, but threaten to further impact food price inflation at grocery stores.
“I just don’t see how I’m going to get paid this year,” Brooks Barnes, a second-generation farmer in Wilson County, North Carolina, told the Wall Street Journal.
Last spring, Barnes, who grows tobacco, corn, soybeans, wheat, and sweet potatoes, paid $16 a gallon for Bayer AG’s Roundup weedkiller. By September it cost him about $40 a gallon and in February, it was $60 a gallon. One of the fertilizers he buys cost him $500 a ton from $175 last spring, he said. Float bed plastic, which holds water for his tobacco plant trays to float on in his greenhouses, cost him $82 a roll, compared with $70 a year ago.
“I’ve always been excited to start a new crop but I’m not excited at all for this one,” he said. Full Story (Subscription Required)
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