News
Expert expects additional fertilizer purchases this week
A market expert says to watch for a possible rush of last-minute fertilizer purchases.
Josh Linville with StoneX says this last week of the year is very busy for retailers and for farmers, and there’s a possibility that sales will go up driven by the desire to save on taxes. “When we look at a lot of the products, a lot of fertilizers have seen values that have been dropping, so of course, that makes us as a buyer want to sit back and say whew, if it’s gone down this much, how much further can it go? But, then again, we’ve also got to keep in mind how much better values are than where we started the year.”
Linville says he’s wondering if the end-of-year fertilizer purchases might be bigger than normal because farmer cash flows are better this year than at the end of most years. “A lot of different points of view are saying that farmers have cash to spend and we’ve not really seen that yet from the retail level so as we move into this last week of the year, this could be a much, much busier period that what a lot of the industry is used to.”
Linville says farmers should at least look at fertilizer prices and what they can get on the futures market for their grain. He says some farmers might want to pull the trigger on a fertilizer purchase if the grain-fertilizer ratio continues to stay better than it was just nine months ago.
