Year in Review and 2023 Preview

Anyone with any time spent in farming knows it’s a job filled with challenges as well as rewards. With soaring input costs, supply chain snags and uncooperative weather in many regions, the past year provided more of the former than the later.“Some of the big items that impacted us this last year especially was we were late due to weather,” remarked Andrew Eddie, a hay grower in Moses Lake, Washington. “We were about a month behind a normal season. Also, crop input prices were very high.”Many of the factors present in 2022 could be back in 2023, including a squeeze on global fertilizer, due to unrest in several areas of the world.“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Redox Bio-Nutrients President Colton Moon said. “The Russian-Ukrainian War has a major impact on fertilizer prices. Russia and Belarus are among the largest potash exporters in the world. China is also a major player, as one of the largest phosphate exporters in the world. When they aren’t exporting, it increases the demand on other exporters to fulfill supply in the marketplace, and that will shoot up prices. Other factors include the price of liquified natural gas and crude oil.”With real concern for the availability and price of agricultural inputs, growers will pay especially close attention to their purchases. As they search for the best return on investment and more assured supply, bio-nutrients may even look more attractive.Redox Bio-Nutrients founder, owner and CEO Darin Moon said an advancement to more efficient crop inputs could gain ground.“We have advanced in tractor technology, irrigation equipment technology and pesticide spray application technology, but some growers are still using the same basic fertilizer technology that was present in the 1970s and 80s,” Moon remarked. “The way that we look at soil regeneration, how plants grow, how nutrients move in the soil and are actually utilized by the plants and how much actual nutrients need to be applied to the soil – that’s how growers will adapt and change.”