Chad Hart, professor, was interviewed for a Sept. 4 Iowa Farmer Today story, "International relations key to maintaining demand."
China is trying to rebuild its hog herd, meaning there is an added need for feed. That will keep them coming to the global marketplace, but any cutbacks means less demand for U.S. soybean exports leading to lower prices.
Much of the relationship between the U.S. and other countries revolves around trade agreements and who needs what goods. Hart said just because a country can control who buys a good, it’s not necessarily in control.
“It doesn’t have to influence us, but it’s definitely going to,” he said. “As time goes by (countries) have to adapt to what they can do internally and where they can participate globally. That makes them more active in setting up trade relationships with a lot of different countries.”
Hart was interviewed for a Sept. 11 Iowa Farmer Today story, "9/11 one of many ‘pivot points’ for ag."
The present COVID-19 pandemic and the 9/11 tragedy of 20 years ago are clearly different, but they have some similarities, according to Iowa State University economist Chad Hart.
In both cases there has been turmoil and after-effects. The immediate concern after 9/11 was about more terrorist attacks, but that meant the recovery was fairly swift.
Hart was interviewed for a Sept. 13 Eagle story, "Farmers would feel infrastructure changes."
The United States Senate passed a major bipartisan infrastructure bill by a 69-30 vote Aug. 10, paving the way for the legislation to become law. Agricultural organizations have largely lauded the move, although they see the bill as imperfect.
“Probably the last five or six presidential administrations have all pledged to increase infrastructure funding,” says Iowa State University Extension ag economist Chad Hart. “This is arguably a well-needed shot in the arm for agriculture. It’s just too bad it didn’t happen 20 years ago when it would have been cheaper.”
Hart did a Sept. 15 interview on KFFX radio about how Covid has affected the ethanol industry.
"As covid hit, we saw shut down a lot of industries and ethanol was one of them. We saw that industry cut itself basically in half in about a four week time frame. after a couple of weeks, we started to recover again. This industry got up to about 80 percent of what it was recovered and then we had the cold snap this winter, which forced the ethanol industry to back off again. Just when we thought we were on the other side of a mountain, getting back to pre covid levels, now we're seeing these higher energy prices, higher corn prices and a little bit of pullback in demand for liquid fuel hurting the industry right now.
"We're still worried about the Delta variant here and that is keeping travel just a little bit lower than normal and that's really hurting not only the ethanol industry, but you're seeing the same squeeze as we look at gasoline and diesel that pressures facing all liquid fuels right now. I think right now our ag markets are going to be export driven, that has been our biggest source of strength through Covid and we'll continue to be, at least for the next six to eight months