Chad Hart, professor, was interviewed for a Jan. 4 Gazette story, "Iowa farm bankruptcies continue to rise, despite aid."
“The government has provided a lot of short-term funding to help farmers get through the year,” Hart said, referring to market facilitation and coronavirus food assistance programs, which funneled two rounds of aid to farmers in 2020.
But for farmers living close to the edge, “there are some long-run problems that don’t necessarily get fixed through a market facilitation payment,” Hart said. “They are needing some additional market recovery to save themselves.”
Overall, 2020 gave some gut punches to farmers — particularly animal producers.
This topic covered by another Gazette story, Feb. 3, "Iowa farm bankruptcies up 26 percent in 2020."
“The support definitely did help,” said Chad Hart, Iowa State University economics professor and crop markets specialist.
“What we were seeing, especially for the dairy industry, some of that support was a little too late.”
A higher bankruptcy toll in the northern district is partly a factor of more farms there, but it also indicates the struggles for dairy farms, concentrated in the northeast and northwest corners of the state, Hart said