Coming up on Market to Market: from beets to beans, farmers navigate high diesel prices at harvest. How one Western community is handling feral horses that have come to town. And commodity market analysis with Shawn Hackett, next.
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This is the Friday, October 16th edition of Market to Market, the Weekly Journal of Rural America.
Hello, I'm Paul Yeager. The midterm elections are two weeks from Tuesday, and this week brought some of the last economic reports before voting day. A majority of these indicators were influenced by one thing: higher gas and diesel prices. Existing home sales rose in September by 1.5%, but remain below a year ago. Buyers still face firm prices and rising interest rates. Consumer inflation came in hot. The consumer price index added six-tenths of a percent on the month and 3.7% on the year, with gasoline accounting for more than half of the monthly gain. Wholesale inflation posted its largest monthly expansion since 2022. The producer price index climbed by 1.3% in September and 6.3% from a year ago. Retail sales, which track total dollars spent by shoppers, went up eight-tenths of a percent. Food and furniture sales gained, but gas stations accounted for most of the increase. AAA says Friday's average diesel price is $0.20, or 3%, below the record set 24 days ago. But it's still 73% higher than a year ago, making this an expensive harvest. From the bean belt to the beet belt, for sugar beet growers, fuel is only half the squeeze. They say imported sugar is undercutting their prices, and they're asking Congress to raise the tariff on it. Our Mountain West bureau chief, Tammy Scardino, reports.
Gabe Flock is one of 600 sugar beet farmers who belong to the Snake River Sugar Beet Growers Association. The sweet vegetable is newer to the mix of about 16 different crop plants.
And the reason we did is, I mean, partly for the stability, we needed another rotation crop.
Sugar beet harvest just started along the Oregon slope for this first-generation farmer. So far, he says it's looking to be an average year for yields, about 45 tons per acre. The projected cooperative average is a little more than 40 tons per acre. Flock, like many in agriculture, is facing pressure from increased fuel costs.
Generally, it costs us about $23 an acre in diesel just to get the beets from this field five miles down the road to the dump. And right now, we're running about $44 an acre.
He's also looking at tariffs pulling down on the price of his beets within the U.S. sugar import system. Tier one imports are the quota sugar, while tier two sugar importers pay a higher over-quota tariff to enter the country, but in unlimited quantities. Samantha Parrott is the executive director of the Snake River Sugar Beet Growers Association, which represents Idaho, Oregon and Washington state.
This is sugar above and beyond what we need for the market. And so right now, we're asking Congress to raise that tier two tariff in order to prohibit that extra sugar from coming in. That truly is undercutting our American farmers.
Parrott says on average, U.S. sugar beet farmers are losing $500 an acre.
Still operating in a loss. But we're hoping that by next year that we kind of start to pull back up into the black.
For Market to Market, I'm Tammy Scardino.
The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 charges the Bureau of Land Management with managing herds of feral horses on public lands. Just last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture invested $30 million to expand wild herd fertility control efforts nationwide to help safeguard the spirit of the West. The funding gives BLM agents access to more options in remote areas where the bands of horses exist. But the question of who handles abandoned horses came up recently in Big Sky country, prompting action. Our Mountain West bureau chief, Tammy Scardino, explains in this week's cover story.
It's not every day you see mares and their yearlings roaming freely in residential subdivisions, but over the last couple of years, these types of sightings have become more frequent in the Miller Creek area south of Missoula, Montana.
Two things kind of happened at once. More housing started to be built down there, and it's really developing fast. Also, the horses, you know, we don't really know why. It could be predators that were after them. It could be, you know, they just found out that, hey, there's nice lush grass to graze on in the homes. But they did start going down into the Lower Miller Creek area.
The herd of about 100 horses roaming around the area are not considered wild because their ancestors were domesticated. Area resident Bobby Thompson says close to her backyard in Upper Miller Creek, rodeos used to be held with spectators sitting on the hillside. The only remnants left behind are this street sign and the ranch horses that were either let go or got loose.
Roughly a year after we moved in, which would have been in 2021, the horses would come up over the hill and graze in the area behind us here, and it was just lovely.
Thompson is a professional horse photographer, and she didn't pass up the opportunity to capture the moment for many years. It was unclear as to which government agency had jurisdiction over the horses. In an attempt to help clear up the confusion, the Missoula County Board of Commissioners considered the options. Among several reasons for adopting a new policy was a concern about road safety. Residents were worried vehicles colliding with a 1,500-pound horse could send a motorist to the hospital. In September of 2025, one of the stallions from the Miller Creek band was hit by a car and the horse had to be put down. Prior to the accident, some residents in the county had no idea feral horses were moving through local neighborhoods. Following the crash, it became a topic of conversation and there was an increase in calls to law enforcement. This incident also resulted in the formation of two Facebook groups. One of them, the Miller Creek Horse Alliance, became a registered nonprofit. Thompson serves as the interim vice president of the Horse Alliance board.
I love having 8 or 10, 12 horses in the backyard when they come through. I don't want 50.
A part of the alliance's focus is to inform the public on how to act around the animals. They sent a letter to the school superintendent requesting educational materials be circulated. This included a safety notice that when the horses show up on school grounds or anywhere near humans, it's advised to not pet them due to the unpredictable behavior of the animals. Also, to not feed the horses because they can become aggressive and bite or kick, Thompson says. Staying at least 50 feet away is your best bet.
If the horses get spooked, and that could be something as a loose dog off leash charging at them, a child making, you know, sudden movements, a car driving by and making a loud noise. And in that situation, they're going to flee. You know, it would be a bad situation if a child or a person were in the way when that happens.
An official management plan was eventually adopted by the Missoula County Board of Commissioners in late 2025. When developing the policy, the board joined forces with several state agency representatives and experts in land and livestock to assess the situation. Among the public concerns were the possible spread of disease to domestic horses and property damage to fences and lawns. Other groups advocated for the horses' freedom and wanted to see the development of a humane management plan because it was almost certain the population would increase. Horse populations can double every four to five years. Josh Slotnick is chair of the Missoula County Board of Commissioners.
And I'm really proud of it because we combined sort of scientific expertise with public engagement and really listened to the neighbors. And what we ended up with was something everybody was pretty happy with.
Ultimately, the resolution that was adopted provides a process to manage conflicts and ban population. The measure also paves the way for future installation of permanent warning signs along county roads. Private landowners can now alert authorities of a problem horse on their property. Local law enforcement and Department of Livestock inspectors can then determine if the horse is in fact feral and does not belong to someone or has been reported stolen. The animal can then be vaccinated and rehomed by the state, the landowner or a nonprofit.
People love horses. They love seeing them on the landscape. They love feeling like, wow, we are living in a kind of coexistence way with animals, and that makes them feel good about where they are. We can live that way. We just have to be smart about it.
For Market to Market, I'm Tammy Scardino.
Next, the Market to Market report.
The market is dealing with harvest hitting full stride and extended sell-off in the wake of USDA boosting yield projections last week. For the trading week ending October 16th, the nearby wheat contract sold off $0.11 and the December corn contract lost $0.06. Another large crop in Brazil and the fast harvest provided pressure on the soy complex. The November soybean contract fell $0.31 and December meal decreased by $8.50 per ton. December cotton sold off $0.54 per hundredweight. November Class III milk futures added $1.27 per hundredweight. The livestock market was higher. December cattle improved to $1.30. January feeders gained $1.93 and December lean hogs put on 310. In the currency markets, the U.S. Dollar Index fell 37 ticks. November crude oil gained 10%, or 9.5 cents per barrel. COMEX gold sold off $38 per ounce, and the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index was up by more than 13 points to settle at 751.65. Here now to lend us his insight on these and other trends is regular market analyst, Shawn Hackett. Hello, sir.
Hey, Paul, wonderful weather. Thank you so much for the great feeling when I got off the plane.
Anything we can do to make you feel like what it was like in Middle America this fall with all the rain and now the cold. And the rain has been the story of the corn and soybean market. But let's talk about the wheat market for a moment, because rain has impacted domestic producers, given them encouragement to plant more wheat acres. Good idea?
Well, with the price that we currently have, I mean, it kind of pencils out pretty nicely right now. And if the Russia-Ukraine situation remains unstable, which everything says it's going to be, you know, that's not a bad proposition at this point to get some more wheat in the ground. It's not the most expensive crop to put in the ground. And if we come out in the spring with, you know, higher prices and such and good yields, they could have some pretty good balance sheets from that.
Russia, Ukraine have been exchanging bombs with each other for quite some time this week. The White House gets involved and there's a deal about diesel, which then gives fuel to one of — to Ukraine, into Russia. And there's a back and forth in a political situation that's happening that's going to play out, I think, in the wheat market. Is that an accurate read?
