Stability is a luxury farmers rarely enjoy. One severe weather event can suddenly swing agriculture markets, as seen by recent widespread floods in the Midwest that sent corn and soybean prices soaring from consistent lows.
Volatility is commonplace in the state’s largest industry, and that’s expected to remain the case in 2016 as producers face tumultuous commodity prices and erratic weather conditions.
Wheat prices dropped more than 30 percent in the last year. Cattle prices have experienced a similar slide, leading to dim prospects for the early part of the new year.
This corner of the state has remained in extreme drought since last spring, when an historic heat wave swept across the region and pushed temperatures into triple digits while little to no moisture arrived all summer.
“The summer was obviously very hard on a lot of people in Western Montana,” Jayson O’Neill, public information specialist with the Montana Department of Agriculture.
Ron de Yong, director of the state’s agriculture department, said it is difficult to predict the industry’s outlook for the upcoming year, but the trend of diversification appears to be helping stabilize any major swings that could impact producers.
The agency has continued to emphasize crop diversification among producers, hoping the different returns of value-added crops will complement one another among volatile market conditions.
In Northwest Montana, a clear example of that success is a new facility being built for cherry producers. The Flathead Lake Cherry Growers were awarded a $60,000 loan in early December to develop a processing facility for cherry and fruit juice products. The plant is being built in partnership with Tabletree Juice, a processor in Creston, British Columbia that produces award-winning juices. The company’s products are made without preservatives or sugar.
Tabletree signed a letter of intent with the Flathead Cherry Growers Association to build the juice plant. The goal is to have the plant developed by the 2016 harvest.
The new plant will help stabilize what can be a very unstable situation — the cherry harvest, de Yong said.
“You can get a bad year so quickly and then you have nothing. But this will give them a plant that can make juice from whatever you’ve got,” de Yong said.
Other producers in the region are similarly finding ways to balance the risks and rewards of the industry, de Yong said.
“We just see so many new businesses trying to innovate and add value,” de Yong said. “It’s really exciting to see.”