Fertilizer Supply and Demand & Record Breaking Production

Fertilizer Supply and Demand & Record Breaking Production

Fertilizer Supply and Demand & Record Breaking Production

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

In a recently released report on the global fertilizer industry Rabobank stated that they view the fertilizer market as "Cloudy, With a Chance of Spring Demand". Stephen Nicholson, Senior Analyst at Rabo AgriFinance explains.

NICHOLSON: If you're a soil fertilizer it looks a little cloudy. Prices are a little soft and so the fertilizer industry's hope is that spring demand will come out and bloom and bring prices up a little bit from where they are right now. We've got a little bit of a hangover of supplies from the fall; not as much field work got done as typically gets done in the heart of the U.S. corn belt because of a very delayed harvest. It was a very wet October; harvest ran into December and some areas right up to Christmas and so they were just trying to crop that, let alone trying to get fertilizer on the ground for next spring. But everyone's hopeful for a good spring and good fieldwork and more acres of corn than what the markets anticipating right now.

According to data released this week by the USDA Washington agriculture had record breaking crop values in 2013 with overall values reaching $10.2 billion; a 2% increase over 2012. While apples remained the state's top crop at $2.2 billion, wheat production values dropped by 12.7% to $1 billion, putting it in third place behind milk, with milk production value going up by 12% to $1.3 billion. Potatoes had a 13.1% increase making them the state's fourth most valuable crop, with a record value of $792 million. With a value of $706.4 million beef became the fifth top ag commodity.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray with the Ag Information Network of the West.

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