It is certainly being an eventful year and once again I find myself in late November celebrating the anniversary of writing this column.  This fall represents the 37th year that I’ve written “Under the Agridome” and if you do the math, you can figure out there’s quite a bit of water under the bridge. Oh, how our world has changed.  If you could have dropped that young kid from 1986 into December of 2023, he surely would not know where he was.

Rewind to this past summer I was combining wheat in a field north of Dresden Ontario.  In retrospect it was one of the most fascinating things I saw this past year.  The neighbor farmer was spraying soybeans with a drone.  It took me awhile to figure it out but that is exactly what he was doing I had heard about this in other parts of the world so although I was surprised, it wasn’t out of this world.  However, in 1986 when I started writing the column, that would have been straight science fiction.

It is hard to judge different farming eras over the length of a career. Times are just so different.   I know when I started writing this column, we were coming into the mid 1980s and the 20% interest rates were behind us, but the pain that they caused were still with us.   At that time, I was writing a lot about government agricultural policy or the lack of. Farm revenues had not kept pace, and times were pretty tough in fact, they were so tough that we actually saw farmland prices fall into the 1990s.   Looking back now, with the high prices and we see for farmland today its science fiction in reverse.

One of the biggest differences between the early days of my writing career and today is how farm capital was viewed so differently.   For instance, in the 1980s capital was hard to come by. Credit was very difficult to get and banks incredibly difficult to deal with. Of course, we all know what the last 10 years have been in Canadian agriculture in the era of low interest.  Capital was very easy to come by and partly because of that we saw huge increases in the fixed price of farm assets.  For many of us who were there in the early days it’s almost comical to think about how some farmers perceive as high interest now.  Needless to say, the difference in capital availability between now and then surely had big effects on how farms were run.

In the early days we also had a little bit more effective government agricultural safety net policies. We had agricultural ministers such as Eugene Whelan and John Wise who build agricultural support programs like GRIP and NISA.  This was largely in response to chronic lower farm revenues. Over time slowly, successive governments dismantled these agricultural safety nets to what they are today.  Through the years I’ve always been a big advocate of them, but I do recognize as we’re heading into 2024 much of the emphasis regarding agricultural safety nets in Canada has been lost.  It’s pretty obvious governments don’t care about that anymore but it’s also the great truth that farm asset values have grown so much the specter of any subsidisation doesn’t make as much sense as it once did.  That’s what time will do for you.   Is has completely rewritten agriculture policy in this country.

Last week I reported to you my corn crops this year was at record levels and after adding up all the numbers it was not only a record, but it smashed my previous records by a mile. For whatever reason this past smoky hazy summer, was nirvana for my corn.  As a point of comparison when you look back to 1986 my average corn yield was about 100 bushels per acre less than I had this year.  That’s what technological change and genetic modification can do aside from all the smoke and haze.  Cash prices in 2023 are approximately double for corn what they were in 1986, triple for soybeans.

Through the years, our agricultural markets have really evolved and changed.  In 1986, the US produced approximately 7.58 billion bushels of corn.  In 2023 the US will produce more than double that to 15.234 billion bushels of corn.  Demand alone for corn this year is 14.465 billion bushels.  In 1986, Brazil produced 17.3 MMT of soybeans, this coming year they are expected to produce 163 MMT.  Needless to say, the vicious cycle of agricultural productivity continues to go round and round.

As for your loyal scribe it’s been a wild ride. I actually wrote that first column 37 years ago with a pen because I didn’t have computer. Now, for several years I’ve been using voice recognition software, which increases my writing efficiency 800%.  To go further, some of you might argue the publishers could use AI, to totally replace me.  Oh, how the world has changed.

I want to thank the many readers and subscribers of DTN who have been with me over my career writing this column. I have been blessed with some great editors over this time and that continues today.   I had a major health scare in 2022 but came out the other side.  Modern medicine can do great things.

So, what’s next for me in this writing journey?  Well, I don’t really see the sun going down yet.  In 37 years from now, it’ll be 2060.  Can you imagine what your farms will be like then?  From experience, let me tell you.  It will be so different, we cannot imagine.