Farm Bankers' Forecast: Cloudy, with Chance of Continued Aid
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Five-banker panel reviews 2000 and looks ahead to the 2001 growing season, finding little cause for optimism Freedom to farm legislation has had a long tryout now, though perhaps not under the most ideal conditions. There will be debate over the merits of continuing in that direction or trying something new, even as other nations pursue their own strategies. financial state of the American farmer will become somewhat of a national security issue, predicts banker Terry Hague. Right now, the American consumer goes to the grocery store, it's full, prices are good, and everybody's happy. But at some future point, that could change. If we don't have a healthy farming base, we'll have to import more and more of our food, much like we've had to do with oil. If Hague sounds concerned, he has a right to be, as you'll learn in reading the following summary of a roundtable discussion among members of ABA's Agricultural and Rural Bankers Committee. The roundtable was held in early October during the ABA/Canadian Bankers Association North American Agricultural Finance Conference. The following excerpts from the roundtable have been edited for space and clarity. Review and Outlook ABA BJ: How did the season wind up in your area? What's the outlook for 2001? Gary Canada, committee chairman and president, Bank of England, Ark.: In my market, the main crops are cotton and rice, with some wheat and soybeans, as well as some vegetables and aquaculture. We had drought problems, so that, in 2000, land that was irrigated produced a good crop and those farmers had a small positive cash flow. That was mostly because of the second government payment that was issued. On our nonirrigated crops, the season was a disaster--what soybeans there were turned out the size of BBs. Overall, we endured about as hard a crop year as we could. In 2001 I believe we will be able to show some positive cash flow, but we're going to have to rely on the government. Marc Meyer, committee vice-chairman, and president, Brenton Bank, Adel, Iowa: I work with our rural banking locations throughout main and central Iowa. Our area has a lot of cash soybeans and corn with some hogs and cattle in the northern parts of our area. The crop this year turned out average to above average. We went into the year with good moisture but didn't receive much rain after the middle of July. Yet, again, this year's crop is quite good. As far as income, we had a very good year because of the good crop, the government corn and soybean program payments, and because our producers did a good lob of marketing. Livestock went through a disaster a couple years ago, but we had good income this year. For 2001, a concern is our subsoil moisture. It's very low and we're going to need a significant amount of moisture to have a good crop. Another concern is we have huge carryover supplies of corn and soybeans. Clearly, as long as we have government support we're going to have good income, because we have the ability to produce good crops in Iowa. However, as we begin to look at the next farm bill, it's possible that the amount of money that the U.S. is putting into supporting agriculture may be a concern. A negative decision about further support could have a long-term impact on the profitability of our farms. Dennis Hackett, president, rural banking group, First Midwest Bank, Morris. Ill.: 2000 had looked like a bumper crop up until mid-August, when we stopped getting rain, but we still had an average to above-average crop. Corn yields came in in the 150-175 bushel range and soybeans 45-55. Our early work with our farmers on cash flows looks positive. I don't believe we're going to have anyone with any carryover debt [unpaid short-term operating credit]. In 2001 one thing we're really going to need is another price spike to give producers some opportunities for pricing. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it