I recently had the pleasure of presenting at the 2016 Montana Seed Trade Association’s annual conference. When putting together the talk, I faced a unique (to me) perspective of seeing farmers as consumers (rather than the traditional view that farmers are the first participants in the food supply chain), and seed marketers as the suppliers. There was a lot of interesting aspects of the agricultural inputs markets that I considered, but I ended up settling on exploring two in particular: how the current status of grain markets and farmers’ future expectations for those markets might impact the demand for agricultural inputs and the trade-offs and potential economic effects of the two proposed mergers by four of the largest agricultural input producers in the world.
