Siouxland farmer looks to the future on National Ag Day

SIOUX CITY (KTIV) -Tuesday March 21, 2023, is National Ag Day and one local farmer is looking at ways to bounce back after a drought filled crop season.

“One of the driest years on record for a lot of folks in the area, and just coming off of times where pricing has been very volatile, both on the input side but also on the crop value side,” Farmer at Nelson Farms Taylor Nelson said.

With potential unknowns in the ag industry, at Nelson farms one thing they think is very important is being on the cutting edge of technology and having information right at their fingertips.

“It’s going to be about doing more with less, and everything that we do, and we’re really doing our best and a lot of farmers are doing their best to leverage technology to figure out how they can get the most possible output out of the least amount of input possible,” Nelson said.

Nelson is a 5th generation farmer and while he is doing what he can to maximize profits a season like he just saw can be tough on the bottom line. He said without subsidized crop insurance in his mind farming wouldn’t be financially feasible and operations would go under.

“Crop insurance is foundational to the risk management of our business,” Nelson said. “We build our marketing strategies around crop insurance, and we really build our whole risk profile around crop insurance, so making sure that that’s strong, and that that’s robust is very, very important to all farmers.”

One thing that is on the top of Nelson’s mind is the markets which he checks multiple times a day on his smart phone and the farm bill which is up for re-authorization on Capitol Hill.

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