Luke Judge

Tom Anderson, a farm business management educator at Riverland Community College in Plainview, Minn., near Rochester, calls the situation in dairyland “severe.” In and around Winona County, a big dairy area, a dozen dairy herds (herds run about 100 to 250 cows) were sold off and dairy operation shut down in the past two months alone, he said. That will be a $10 million economic hit to the region, he estimates.

“How do you get your arms around something so big?” he said. “It is a state of emergency in a lot of ways.”

Hog producers such as Joe Malecek have been caught in the vise grip too.

“Everyone in the hog industry took a big bath,” said Malecek, who has been raising hogs for half a century, the last 20 years on his farm with a twisting creek and woods filled with oak trees above the Minnesota River. He grew Mor-Pork Inc. into a multimillion-dollar operation.

The local bank worked with him in recent years when operating costs rocketed, pork prices tanked and Mor-Pork was losing money by the truckload. His $1.4 million loan was extended several times.

Then it was called in.

The move forced Malecek, 73, to sell all of his 21,000 pigs last year, essentially shutting down the only livelihood he’s ever known. It didn’t help that he had been doing business with the Redwood Falls bank for decades, and used to be on the board.

“They’re my friends, and they kept telling me that ‘we’ve got bank examiners that aren’t pleased with your loan,’” Malecek said.

Driving his van past his cornfields up to a big, gray house with a turret, surrounded by pumpkins, Malecek is quick to point out that he’s not in the poorhouse. When times were better, they moved the grand old farmhouse to this spot overlooking the Minnesota River valley. Then they tricked it out with an elevator, pool and a home theater with overstuffed chairs — finishing it all just before the hog markets soured in 2007, he said.

Malecek said he lost $3 million in 2008 and 2009 combined — though he never technically defaulted on his $1.4 million loan with Minnwest Bank, also in Redwood Falls, because the bank extended it several times before telling him he had to pay up. That was hard to hear from a bank where he once had been a director for eight years.

Even after selling his hogs, he still owed $500,000. Malecek said he hired a bankruptcy attorney and told the bank they’d have to take him to court.

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Switzerland: After forty years of bilateral cooperation, Switzerland closed its cooperation office in Ecuador at the end of June 2010. This closure is based on a decision by the SDC to concentrate its finances on a smaller number of priority countries in order to achieve a greater impact. Ecuador is now a country with a medium income level.

Switezrland’s investments focused mainly on agricultural development in Ecuador. In the area in which the SDC was active, agricultural income has risen by 21 to 50% in the past two decades. In the Nabón canton of the Province of Azuay it has risen by over 100% in the past decade. Better training offers, new infrastructure (e.g. irrigation systems), access to financial services and improved marketing of agricultural produce made this increase in income possible and helped to slow down immigration to the cities. With an additional 15,000 hectares of irrigated land, 16,000 farming families have increased their agricultural yield by about 70%.

Source: sdc.admin.ch/en/Home/News/Close_up?itemID=193842

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The Herald reports

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