Happy Friday! ☕ Pour the coffee, prop up your boots, and let's talk about the number nobody wants to hear: three to five years.
That's how long half of ag economists think you'll be waiting for crop margins to get healthy again.
We've also got a Winnipeg tractor company going shopping in Germany, and a farm that's been in one family since before the Pilgrims got comfortable.
Let's dig in.
💸 The Big Bin — Half of Economists Say Profitable Crops Are 3 to 5 Years Out
Bad news for anyone hoping this was the turnaround year: the folks who do this math for a living aren't buying it. Farm Journal's June Ag Economists' Monthly Monitor just dropped, and the mood is grim.
What happened. In the July 2 survey, half of the ag economists polled said crop farming won't return to broadly profitable margins for another three to five years. Only 19% think it happens within a year, and — brutal detail — zero said agriculture is already back to sustainable profitability.
Why it happened. It's the same vise Prairie growers know by heart: commodity prices stuck below breakeven, input costs that won't quit, and working capital quietly draining off the balance sheet. As one economist put it, breakeven costs "remain above market prices for most commodities." Down here, the reflex is to blame Ottawa; down there, it's a $44.3-billion pile of U.S. government payments doing the heavy lifting — without it, the picture would look far worse.
What it means for the farm gate.
🌾 Margins don't stop at the border. This is a U.S. survey, but canola, wheat, and pea growers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba are staring at the same spread between the cost of a seeded acre and what the elevator's paying. Cheap inputs "aren't cheap" when the crop underneath them won't cover the bill.
📉 The market isn't riding to the rescue this week. Front-month canola settled around $729/t 📉 on Thursday, down $12.20 (−1.65%), and Chicago wheat slipped to 590½¢ 📉. Corn did tick up to 425¢ 📈 — but "up a nickel" isn't the same as "profitable."
🎲 The wild cards are the usual suspects. Economists flagged weather, Chinese demand, and trade as factors that could flip the script quickly. One noted the quickest path back to real money isn't a demand boom — it's a supply shock (read: a drought somewhere big), which is a grim way to root for margins.
🚜 Tractor Tech & Trends — Winnipeg's Buhler Versatile Goes Shopping in Germany
A Prairie machinery name is about to plant a flag in Europe. Winnipeg-based Buhler Versatile — the folks behind those unmistakable big four-wheel-drive tractors — has agreed to buy the operating business of Germany's ATLAS Group, one of the country's oldest construction-machinery makers.
🏗️ The deal: Buhler Versatile (part of the ASKO Group) is scooping up the assets of the ATLAS companies — excavators, material handlers, and crane technology — plus a stake in Atlas Cranes UK. ATLAS had slipped into restructuring back in February, and this rescue keeps the lights on and a big chunk of the workforce employed.
🌍 The So What? This is a Canadian ag-equipment company buying its way into European construction iron. It gives Versatile a manufacturing base and dealer reach across the pond — and it's a rare story of a Prairie brand doing the acquiring instead of getting swallowed by a green or red multinational.
🔧 Watch this space: more scale and more factories can eventually mean more parts availability and product crossover for the folks running Versatile tractors here at home. It won't change your fall lineup, but it's a sign the company's playing offense.
👉 Dig in
🌽 The Grazing Pen — 11 Generations on the Same Dirt
Think your family's been on the home quarter a while? Meet the folks who make "generational farm" sound like a rookie stat.
🏛️ Virginia's Shirley Plantation is billed as the oldest family-owned business in North America — the Hill-Carter family has farmed the same James River ground since 1638. Current owner Charles Carter is the 11th generation; his kids make 12.
🌱 Still a real working farm. Tobacco built it centuries ago; today it's corn, soybeans, wheat, and a new pecan venture rotating through the same fields that fed the Virginia colony.
📚 History you can walk through. The family genealogy book lists 83,000 descendants from one ancestor who died in 1732, and the on-site schoolhouse is where a young Robert E. Lee once studied. Even the old letters, Carter says, are full of neighbours "trash-talking each other about their plows." Some things never change.
The So What? 🚜 Everybody's fretting about margins and the next three-to-five years — fair enough. But 400 years of one family staying put is a reminder that farming's real time horizon is measured in generations, not marketing years.
📊 Stat of the Day — 3 to 5 Years
Circle it on the calendar. Then erase it, because you'll probably be re-drawing it next June.
3 TO 5 YEARS — how long half of the ag economists in Farm Journal's June survey think crop farming will take to return to broadly profitable margins. Just 19% expect it inside a year. And the share who say we're already there? A clean 0%.
To put it in farmer terms: plant a windbreak sapling today, and it might be taller than your margins by the time both are worth bragging about. 🌾
How long half of ag economists say we'll wait for profitable crop margins.
👋 The Sign-off
That's the kernel for this Friday.
Whether you're pencilling out a longer road to breakeven, watching a Winnipeg tractor brand buy up Germany, or just quietly grateful your ground's been in the family more than a season or two — take the long view and enjoy the long weekend.
We'll see you Monday. 🌅🍁
Stay sharp out there.
— The Daily Kernel