Chad Hart, professor, was interviewed for a Dec. 9 Politico story, "Another eye-popping inflation reading is ahead. Next year could look very different."
“We had our strongest prices back in May, June, July of this year,” said Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University. “On the crop side, even as I look at the livestock side, we see prices easing there.”
The relief from those steady decreases might not be as dramatic for consumers. “Food prices are sticky, so they love to go up, but they hate to go down, whereas commodity prices can move very rapidly in both directions,” Hart said. He added that food prices also include costs from packaging and storing to shipping and marketing. But lower crop prices could prevent grocery prices from rising much next year compared to sharp increases this year, he said.