Trey Malone, the Boehlje Endowed Chair for Managerial Economics and Agribusiness at Purdue University, says the current farm economy is difficult to compare with previous downturns. “The 1980s, which is what everybody anchors toward, was a time of risk, which means you can assign a probability to the outcome of whatever the cropping window was,” said Malone. “We are in a world that is very much driven by uncertainty and uncertainty means you cannot put a simple probability around the outcome anymore. The changes in what’s going on in the farm economy are so structural that we don’t really have a mental model for what the future might look like right now.” Malone addressed the Ag Bankers Conference Wednesday. Listen to the interview.
