Secretary of Ag visits Hampton as part of Agriculture Outlook Meeting

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig looks at 2020 of a year of possibilities while admitting 2019 was a year of struggles for Iowans in the ag industry.

Addressing an audience of nearly 50 at First Bank Hampton's annual Agriculture Outlook Meeting last Friday, Naig touched on obstacles seen in 2019, which included historic flooding, a crippling propane shortage and uncertainty in foreign trade agreements.

“Three words I could think of when I thought of 2018 were uncertainty, variability and extreme and what I was hoping for in 2019 was that we’d do better in all those fronts,” he said. “We didn’t do so well addressing those three things, did we?

“We have to acknowledge we had a lot of extremes and variability in terms of weather,” he said.

The complications from 2019’s weather, he said, include the 100,000 acres of farmland that were flooded in Southwest Iowa in March and gravel roads that were destroyed by rapid freezing and thawing throughout the state.

He said, as of now, the flooding outlook for this spring looks more favorable than it has in previous years.

“We’ve got highly saturated soils across the upper Mississippi and Missouri River basins, snow pack trending slightly below average, which is a good thing,” he said.

Regarding markets and trade, Naig said 2019 was an unpredictable and uncertain year. He said a large area of frustration was the length of time it took to amend the United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement.

“That USCMA was actually signed by the countries on November 30 of 2018 and it took us until December of 2019 to get it through the house and until last week to get it through the Senate,” he said. “There are some things we can’t control but there are a bunch of things we can control and shame on us if we don’t control those things. This USCMA was something we could pass through Congress and get moving on to provide some certainty to our markets.”

Now that it’s passed through Congress and expected to be signed by President Donald Trump, Naig said the agreement will be a major boost in confidence for ag professionals in the nation. “If we couldn’t get a deal done with our closest neighbors, some of our closest allies and closest trading partners, who would want to deal with us?” he said. “I think getting the USCMA done is a tremendous psychological win and something that will carry into the future.”

Overseas, he said the trade situation with China was also a consistent point of interest for producers across the nation in 2019. He said that while the path to resolving the issues was long and frustrating, he said the outlook looks better than before the conflicts began.

“I’ve been asked many times if you’d rather just go back to the way things were before the trade war started and no, I wouldn’t,” he said. “We were selling a lot of soybeans to China, sure, but there were a lot of things we weren’t selling to China and there was no reason we shouldn’t have been selling more of these things. They were using non-tariff barriers to block our products from coming in.

“This was not anywhere close to a fair trade relationship with China,” he added.

He said the amendments and progress made in the trade war with China are a good start but there are still conversations and work to be done.

“It is a phase I, it is not an endgame by a long shot,” he said.

Along with improved weather and positive advances in trade agreements, another bright spot in 2020 is the recent Presidential announcement allowing year-round access to E-15 fuel for flex-fuel vehicles at gas pumps.

“I think I’m going to put in about one day a week standing by gas pumps saying ‘Yes, you can use that,’” he said, with a laugh. “What this allows us to do is provides certainty for fuel marketers to go ahead and offer E-15. They don’t have to worry about folks being confused or having issues with model years.”

Following his outlook, Naig answered questions regarding additional issues in the state of agriculture.

Along with Naig, the Outlook Meeting also included addresses from Dennis Todey, Director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub and Chad Hart, from Iowa State University.