Recently, Farm Director KC Sheperd had the chance to visit with the Co-Founder of the Farmers Business Network, Charles Baron, about how FBN can help farmers increase their profits and more.
“FBN is a network of over 75,000 farms across the U.S. and Canada, and a little bit in Brazil,” Baron said. “We effectively help growers get more information, more power, and more transparency in the market by being online so they can connect with one another through our community or analytics. They can buy inputs online, get loans through FBN, do their grain marketing, get sustainability premiums…”
Baron was also able to give an outlook on the chemical market. Baron said chemical prices skyrocketed in 2021 and 2022, then came down at a fast rate in 2023.
“There has been tremendous volatility in the chemical market in the last couple of years,” Baron said. “It really started with Covid, and then the various impacts the supply chain ran into with the ports shut down, manufacturing shut down in China, the hurricanes that hit the United States, which took plants offline in 2021…”
While chemical prices were still at historical highs in 2023, Baron said producers had to learn to find balance in that area. Now, Baron said after some capacity was built into the system, as more products came into the market, prices have come down dramatically, putting some of the larger products at historic lows.
“This is sort of now starting to return to a normal pricing season where you are going to see prices probably increase as you continue to get closer and closer to planting, so it is a perfectly good time to purchase,” Baron said. “We have great prices in FBN right now, and we also have ‘rate lock’ where you can lock in low-interest financing on your purchases.”
Supply is still good, Baron said, because, in some cases, there was an overstocking of chemicals.
FBN has recently released a new way to help producers manage chemical planting. As the process is tedious and takes weeks of work, Baron said FBN’s technology, AcrePlan, handles the process within minutes.
Baron said it is free to be a member at FBN, as the whole mix of American agriculture is included.
For more information, Baron said to visit FBN.com.
