Farm Income In This State Is Expected To Drop By Nearly 50% This Year

Nebraska ranks second in the most head of beef cattle, only trailing behind Texas, and also contributes a significant amount of the country’s chicken eggs, soybeans, corn, and beans. And farm income in 2015, according to the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, is taking a massive nosedive–45% lower than the year before.

“The three-year forecast, produced in conjunction with the Nebraska Business Forecast Council, predicts 2015 Nebraska farm income of about $3.5 billion, its lowest level since 2009,” writes KNOP News. That’s a direct result of reductions in prices of various livestock and, especially, crops. We’ve written before about the price of wheat dramatically dropping, and the same happened with the price of broiler chickens (the specific type of white-feathered chicken, raised for meat, that’s most popular in this country) even despite the avian flu.

This is a major downturn from earlier this year, when the same Bureau of Business Research predicted only a 7 percent reduction in farm income. The change is almost wholly due to crops, rather than livestock; despite continual fears that the American love of beef will subside, the hamburger still reigns as king here. Beef prices, according to AgWeb, are still quite strong. Not so much with corn, soybeans, hay, and sorghum.

In Nebraska City, corn, the state’s most popular crop, sold for $7.05 a bushel in 2013. This year? $3.43 a bushel, a reduction of more than half. “Soybean prices dropped 37 percent and wheat dropped 34 percent during the same two-year period,” writes KNOP.

That said: the Bureau’s report suggests that 2016 and 2017 will have some stabilizing qualities. Corn had a particularly good year this year, with high supply and thus low prices, which is unlikely to become the norm. And Nebraskans should hope so–farm income, normally a very small part of any state’s total income, represents more than 9 percent of Nebraska’s total income. A 45 percent drop is no drop in the bucket for Cornhuskers.

Image via Flickr user Richard Hurd

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