On Topic: Scary times for poultry farmers

Let's start in the land of fiction, where we often bury ideas to see if the world is ready for them.

In Michael Connelly's 1993 novel 'The Black Ice,” detective Harry Bosch is attempting to work his way through a clutch of seemingly separate unsolved investigations, cases he suspects are connected.

'What he had were parts of the whole. What he needed was the glue that would correctly hold them together,” Bosch determines. When he first became a detective, he recalls, another cop advised him that 'facts weren't the most important part of an investigation, the glue was. He said the glue was made of instinct, imagination, sometimes guesswork and most times just plain luck.”

It seems we might need some 'glue” to see our way beyond the swirl of unfortunate events that have gripped Iowa's farmers in the past few months and weeks.

China slapped a ban on U.S. corn in November 2013 after that nation rejected about a million tons of it when it determined that Swiss biotech company Syngenta had mixed its shipments with genetically modified corn seed. Now China is not the biggest importer of U.S. corn - it's somewhere around 17th, according to the U.S. Grains Council - but the loss of that market was 'absolutely a factor in lower corn prices,” Solon farmer Ed Ulch told Gazette reporter Orlan Love for a story in this newspaper in mid-April.

Indeed, prices dropped from $6.79 a bushel to $4.63 between July and October 2013. The National Grain & Feed Association speculates damages suffered by U.S. farmers and grain exporters from that decline was more than $1 billion.

(Rumors bubbled up at the start of the month that Monsanto, which has facilities in Williamsburg and elsewhere in Iowa, had approached Syngenta about a possible takeover. That would, as Bloomberg Business reported, 'create a giant in the market for seeds and crop chemicals with more than $30 billion in revenue.”)

Though China lifted its ban on some GMO shipments in December, lawsuits against Syngenta remain in the works.

But that temporary buying halt, plus very helpful weather, produced a surplus of corn.

The result is prices have not been, let's say, robust. Good news for farmers who buy the grain for feed?

Could have been - but then came the dark shadow cast by H5N2 avian flu. Millions of chickens and turkeys have been killed because of the outbreak - whole flocks have been euthanized in which infections have been found.

This has been frightening news for Iowa farmers and not great, either, for the chickens and turkeys.

Gov. Terry Branstad declared a state of emergency for the nation's No. 1 egg producing state on May 1.

'This is about as scary as it gets for folks in the industry,” state Ag Secretary Bill Northey said.

'You can take all precautions, do all the work, spend all the money, and still get it,” said Tim Graber, a Wayland-area turkey farmer, said to Love in late April.

Since December, dozens of our trading partners closed their borders - in total or in part - to U.S. poultry. Complete bans have been put in place by China, South Korea and Angola.

Those markets constitute almost $700 million in business in 2014, Reuters reports.

Add to this the healthy U.S. dollar that hurts farmers, and most any other American business, who sell overseas - why purchase at a higher U.S. price when you get what you want from a country whose weak currency buys you more? On top of that are projections of another big harvest for 2015.

And we won't even get into how all this affects Deere and Co., where dimmed ag machinery sales have triggered job cuts.

In all, the USDA anticipates net farm income nationwide will be some 32 percent lower this year, to $73.6 billion, the Economist magazine writes.

Needless to say, Iowa's farmers could use a silver lining. They want to find the glue detective Bosch talks about, that inspiration and hope, that would aid them in calculating what to do next, and to help them sleep better at night.

So is there any good news? Yes - warm weather.

As temperatures rise, the virus will find it harder to survive, reporter Chelsea Keenan noted in a Gazette story this past month. CDC officials add that ultraviolet rays on those sunny days also can destroy the virus.

So, for Iowa poultry farmers, that sunshine and warmer days cannot come soon enough.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise editor and business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com