Harvested mustard seeds bagged into gunny sacks in the Bharatpur district of Rajasthan, India.Photographer: T. Narayan/Bloomberg
Plus he’s having to spend more on fertilizer, if he’s lucky enough to find enough supplies. Further south in Maharashtra state, Murlidhar Patil, 75, grows guava, wheat and soybeans with his brother. Since the start of the pandemic, food inflation has meant that demand is falling for the fruit he grows.
While prices may be up at the market, Patil is getting paid less for his crops, which now fetch as little as 25,000 rupees ($330) annually per acre, down from as much as 60,000 rupees three or four years ago, he said. “We are suffering a lot,” Patil said. “Prices of all our inputs have risen, but rates of my produce haven’t risen. And at the same time labor costs have also risen. It’s really painful.”
Brazil
Many farmers in Brazil, the world’s top soybean exporter, aren’t waiting to see if their costs start to pull back. Instead, they’re buying up fertilizers and other inputs now, rather than taking a gamble.
That’s the case for Eduardo Zorzi, manager for Bavaresco Group, which farms more than 20,000 acres in Sorriso, Mato Grosso. It’s not just concerns about prices that led to his decision, he said he’s also worried about actually getting the supplies he needs in time.
Fertilizer stored in a warehouse at a soybean farm near Brasilia, Brazil.Photographer: Andressa Anholete/Bloomberg“With the crazy volatility we are seeing, I decided not to wait any longer and bought my fertilizers for the upcoming soybean crop,” he said.
Leandro Bianchini took similar action. Bianchini is the commercial supervisor for Coacen, the largest co-op in Mato Grosso that plants more than 1 million acres a year, and he didn’t want to take any chances for the next soybean harvest. So he’s already purchased all the inputs needed for the planting season, which doesn’t start until mid-September. Now he’s even looking ahead to the 2023 winter corn crop that will be sown next March.
“There are still lots of unknowns on those costs, and grain prices are not as high as costs for next year,” Bianchini said.
