Cost of raising corn grows

Since 2002, Iowa corn growers’ production costs, for instance, have increased by about $55 per acre due to higher energy prices, pushing farmers’ variable costs 31 percent higher, said Dave Coppess, an executive with Heartland Cooperative in West Des Moines. During that same four-year period, the cost for nitrogen fertilizer alone has doubled, he said.

“For the major producing nations, they all have very high energy prices. Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Canada and the European Union – we’re all facing those kind of increases,” Keith Collins, chief economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., said.

The same factors affecting Worthington’s bottom line are rippling throughout the U.S. farm economy. Higher energy costs have hit crop and livestock producers, as well as farmer-owned cooperatives, grain processors, truckers, manufacturers and other agribusinesses, economists said.

Des Moines Register