Page 36 - Flathead Beacon // 9.28.16

BUSINESS MONTHLY
Ag Rebounds After 2015’s Drought- lled Season
Local harvests reaping “above average” yields as production, employment increase across state
BY MOLLY PRIDDY OF THE BEACON
Agriculture in Montana looks to be back on the right track after last year’s rough market and drought-ridden grow- ing season, the state reported, and local farmers are nding more success in their harvests than last year.
“We’ve experienced more volatility in the past ve years than we have in the past several decades,” Mountain West Co-op agronomy division manager Andy Lybeck said.
Last summer was hot and dry in the Flathead, leaving local dry-land farm- ers – meaning those who don’t irrigate their elds – with harvests roughly half of their usual bounty. The heat hindered grain production, and grain prices have been low since 2014.
This summer’s cooler, wetter weather helped most of the agricultural e orts here in the Flathead, Lybeck said, with a few exceptions when it came to more extreme weather cases. Overall, most areas of the local market – peas, canola, wheat, and hay – saw increases over last year, he said.
“It’s not a record by any means, but certainly above average,” Lybeck said. “It looks like we really rebounded from last year, being one of the poorest years. It seems like we have quite a lot of hay run- ning around the valley.”
A frost on June 12 had serious impact on the local winter wheat yield, and it has been a challenge for farmers to cut and dry the hay in their elds. Lybeck said though there is more hay than last year, when the valley had to import hay for livestock, it has been, in general, lower quality than other years.
“It was a challenging year to get hay up, out, and dry,” he said.
The Flathead Valley seemed to take the brunt of the wheat “hiccup” last year, Lybeck said, because in other areas it wasn’t too rough. But the frost damage didn’t help this year’s yield, even though
Wheat is seen against a backdrop of bins at Doug Manning’s farm east of Kalispell; Hay harvest in a eld east of Kalispell; A wheat eld near Somers. BEACON FILE PHOTOS
Ron de Yong, director of the state Department of Agriculture, said the agri- culture economy is much more volatile than other markets, because since food is a standard necessity, people tend to buy the same amount regardless of supply.
“We’re good at farming, so we gener- ally get into a situation where we raise too much wheat, and the price comes down dramatically, but the volume doesn’t change,” de Yong said.
This means the total revenue for what could be the same amount of product changes each year, based on a sensitive market.
De Yong also said that though the Labor Day report said agriculture only accounts for 4 percent of the state’s total GDP, that is misleading and not the real- ity for many small communities through- out the state.
“If you’re in a small town, it’s 100 percent (of your economy),” de Yong said. “The turnover e ect on those dol- lars is huge. They generally gure at least around ve to one, it really is a big- ger chunk than it sounds like in those reports.”
In general, Montana’s producers have been getting more value for their prod- ucts, with the average value per producer per product sold increasing by 59 percent, when the usual average sits around 39 percent, he said.
Much of that increase has to do with new techniques for farming peas and len- tils on no-tilled ground. De Yong said the United States still has the strongest econ- omy in the world, meaning our dollar is powerful, which can have a detrimental a ect on export prices.
But there is hope for wheat produc- ers, he said, as the market looks like it will be righting itself in terms of prices increasing.
“I can see some light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
mpriddy@ atheadbeacon.com
the damage was sporadic.
“It was just hugely variable across the
valley,” Lybeck said. “We saw decreases of 40 percent in some places and then no damage in other places.”
The cooler summer weather helped keep insects and pests manageable, but the ip side of that is more fungal and bacteria issues than average, he said.
As of last week, Lybeck estimated more than 90 percent of local farmers were close to the end of harvest.
Statewide, agriculture had a strong year in 2015, according to the annual
Labor Day Report from the state Depart- ment of Labor and Industry. Last year’s agriculture added $209 million to the state’s gross domestic product (GDP), constituting a 13.7 percent increase.
Though the market may have been volatile in the last ve years, the state recorded signi cant growth in agricul- ture, with 4.4 percent GDP growth every year since 2010. It also saw an 8.5 percent increase in employment statewide.
The strong year started to diminish toward the end of 2015, the report said, and into the rst quarter of 2016.
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SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM