Bumpy Crop: Farming’s Sudden Feasts and Famines

Bumpy Crop: Farming’s Sudden Feasts and Famines

Wall Street Journal

SCOTT KILMAN and ROGER THUROW

Benjamin Riensche has just come off two of his best years in farming. But like growers all over the globe, he is in the midst of a more turbulent era of sharply rising and then suddenly falling prices.

Now the 47-year-old, who grows corn and soybeans across 10,000 acres in Iowa, fears he will incur losses in 2009 that would be his first red ink in 16 years. His revenue is falling, but the costs of seed, fertilizer and machinery have remained high.

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