Who Benefits from Outlook Forum?

USDA will issue commodity outlooks for 2022 at its annual Agricultural Outlook Forum in February.

"The people that are, I think, primarily interested in this information are the folks who buy and sell these commodities and create these commodities."

Mark Jekanowski chair of the USDA's World Agricultural Outlook Board, stresses that individual farmers also benefit from the information.

"It's the farmer who will use these commodity outlooks and price projections and the market signals that are reflected in those price projections.  The farmer is going to use this information to develop their own acreage mix and determine what to plant and how much to plant."

One example Jekanowski notes is high prices for fertilizer.

"So that could impact acreage of some of the more fertilizer intensive commodities, like corn, or like cotton.  But on the same token, prices for those commodities are also relatively high, so there's going to be some trade-off's there."

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