Defying Gravity or Starting to Fall? An Updated Look at Seed Expense Trends

One way for producers to adjust to the low commodity price environment is through lower variable costs of production. We’ve wrote about this a lot and have found that, to date, fertilizer has been the largest source of cost reductions and early signs show additional fertilizer price relief possible in 2017. Another large variable expense in producers’ budgets is seed. As we’ve wrote about in earlier posts (here and here), seed expense has increased in recent years and accounts for a growing share of total expense. In this week’s post, we take an updated look at the latest corn and soybeans data to see if seed expense trends are defying gravity or starting to adjust lower. (more…)