There is no crystal ball in which to see the future of farming, but current trends give some reasons for concern, H. Louis Moore told his audience at Wednesday's agricultural seminar.

More than 250 people turned out Wednesday morning for the 25th annual seminar, presented at Shady Maple Smorgasbord in East Earl. It featured five speakers, among them Moore, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State, who encouraged farmers to start thinking globally.

Moore said U.S. farmers are now competing domestically and internationally with overseas producers. He said Brazil alone has overtaken the United States in the world market in several key areas, including beef and poultry exports.

"We have to really be competitive with the whole world," Moore said. "It's not just a small part of Lancaster or Lebanon counties."

Moore said the economic outlook for 2008 could be bleak, with the United States headed for a recession. Consumer debt is on the rise, and with crude oil about $100 a barrel, so are gasoline prices.

Moore added that he wouldn't be surprised if some banks were to fold before the housing bust is finished, possibly hurting farmers' access to credit.

"When you have to go to Dubai and other places to get the money to support some of our biggest banks, you're in real big trouble," Moore said.

However, the economic picture is not completely bleak for farmers. Last year, U.S. farm income was a record $87.1 billion, up from $54.4 billion in 2006.

High livestock, meat and milk prices have helped farmers make a profit. But high grain prices have taken a toll both on consumers and livestock farmers, leading to higher food prices and increased costs for farming operations.

Moore singled out corn, which last year achieved both a record yield — of 13.1 billion bushels — and record prices. When corn reached $3 a bushel in 2006, it was the highest price in more than a decade. Yet Moore estimated the price could go as high as $5.10 a bushel by December.

Corn prices have been driven by the increased production of corn-based ethanol, which Moore called an impractical, "feel-good solution to the energy problem."

He said corn ethanol has proven to be less efficient as a fuel and more expensive to produce than gasoline.

Nevertheless, ethanol companies are lobbying Congress to make an ethanol blend mandatory in gasoline, Moore said, because there is too much supply and too little demand.

Moore took issue with a recent claim of Samuel Bodman, U.S. Secretary of Energy, that the ethanol industry is close to standing on its own feet and subsidies could be reduced or ended.

"I don't know where (Bodman's) head is, but it sure isn't realistic," Moore said. "That industry is not on its feet, and it's not likely to be."

In another talk, Paul Knight, a meteorology professor at Penn State and the state's climatologist, gave his predictions for the weather during this year's growing season.

Knight said he has been looking at trends in climate regions all over the United States to create "analog predictions" — weather models extrapolated from past conditions using a dash of intuition. "The idea behind this is that there's some memory in the atmosphere to what has happened before," Knight said. "It's not identical … but it's similar, and that's what we're using."

Knight said he predicts this summer will have roughly normal temperatures and no severe droughts.

Knight said his models indicate wet and dry months will alternate during the season, with June and August seeing the bulk of rain, and July and September being drier.

La Niña — a period of colder than average sea temperatures in the Pacific Ocean around the Equator — is the force driving current patterns, Knight said.

"The oceans, which cover seven-tenths of the globe, are the primary driver of our seasonal weather and the anomalies we experience across the world," Knight said.

Also speaking were Greg Duncan, president of Susquehanna Bank, who gave an update on the bank's agricultural division; Bob Munson of the University of Pennsylvania, who spoke about the economics of reproduction in dairy herds; and William Alexander of Pilgrim's Pride turkey operation, who talked about the growth of his company.

The seminar was sponsored by Susquehanna Bank, which absorbed former sponsor Blue Ball Bank in November

E-mail: myoder@lnpnews.com