COLUMBUS, Ohio – Big conventions and conferences are back on and in full force within the agriculture industry after many in-person events were modified throughout the last two years because of the pandemic.
The International Production and Processing Expo was held in Atlanta and the Cattle Industry Convention wrapped up in Houston. Agriculture expert Andy Vance attended both.
“These are great opportunities for members of these industries to gather, and in both cases, that means everything from the farmers and ranchers and producers who are actually working with the animals to all the allied industries that support them,” Vance said.
Those businesses include animal feed companies, nutrition consultants, manufacturing entities, etc.
“Companies like John Deere that most of the viewing audience has heard of will be part of these kind of meetings, so great opportunity to get together, talk about some of the issues, the challenges, opportunities and do a little bit of networking as well,” he said.
Vance said there are two big issues facing both the poultry and cattle industries. He said the first involves inflation.
“One of those being rising cost of doing business, so, you know, we’ve been covering inflation in general and inflation is just talking about prices going up. And so when you’re looking at what it takes to process, to feed, to process, and distribute the proteins that these industries create: beef, chicken, eggs, turkey, etc. The cost of doing that is good at getting more expensive,” he said. “Feed costs are going up. Certainly, if you’re trying to build barns or if you have to do any maintenance repairs on your facilities, the cost of doing that is going up.
The other challenge is finding help.
“Another one that you know we’ve got we’ve been talking about kind of across industries, but it’s particularly challenging in the agriculture space because, in addition to the same labor market challenges, every industry is dealing with, you also have the aspect of that some people just don’t simply want to work in barns with livestock. You know, animals put off various smells and their nutrient waste stream maybe is the most pleasant to deal with. And so that turns away some people from the industry and finding good help. As the saying goes, it’s been really hard lately,” he said.
Despite all of this, Vance said the industry is optimistic about demand.
“[Consumers] haven’t really turned away at the meat case yet, so if you go to the grocery store and you might say, ‘Gosh, you know, the price of chicken breast is up how many ever cents a pound or dollars a pound and same thing for a variety of steaks.’ The data shows that we, as people buying food, have not turned away from meat yet due to higher costs. And so that’s been really encouraging. That demand is really, really strong. Export markets, despite the challenge in getting containers to be able to ship products overseas, have still been very strong,” Vance said.
