A shaken U.S. agriculture industry already “stressed” by a profitability squeeze in a pandemic year may see little relief in 2021, according to a survey of industry lenders, Bloomberg News reported. Agricultural lenders reported that “just under” 51 percent of their borrowers were profitable this year and about half those lenders don’t expect borrower profitability to improve next year, according to the Fall 2020 Agricultural Lender Survey from the American Bankers Association and Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation, also known as Farmer Mac. That’s down from 2019, when lenders said about 57 percent of borrowers were profitable. Almost a quarter of lenders expect bankruptcies to increase this year, similar to 2019, though 57 percent expect a rise next year due to a marked increase in strain. Such a view “may be due to expectations that the damages of 2020 will take time to lead to bankruptcies, uncertainty in government program support, and expectations for weak markets in 2021,” the report said.
