A group of Wyoming farmers and ranchers will come together the morning of Sept. 24 doing something few producers ever get to do: communicating to the nation’s central bank, in their own words, the challenges the agricultural industry is currently facing.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City will host a regional roundtable on agricultural economic conditions that day at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne. Producers from Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska will take part in a two-hour discussion with Kansas City Fed economists, followed by lunch.

John Hewlett, a ranch and farm management extension specialist in the University of Wyoming Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, is working with the Kansas City Fed to organize Wyoming’s participation. Hewlett helped identify and recruit a cross section of operators intended to reflect the breadth of agriculture in the state. He will also contribute to session discussions.

“Working with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, and our extension colleagues, we have assembled a small group that reflects Wyoming’s livestock and crop agriculture,” Hewlett said.“ This is an opportunity for producers to explain conditions that don’t always show up clearly in regional numbers, including transportation and marketing challenges, our arid environment, irrigation water issues, and the realities of producing livestock and crops in Wyoming.”

Hewlett has been with the UW Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics since 1987, and has built much of his extension career around farm and ranch financial management, risk management, and decision tools, including the regional RightRisk and Risk Navigator programs.

Working with Hewlett were extension colleagues Jay Parsons of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Stephen Koontz of Colorado State University, who assembled participants from their respective states.

A working session, not a public meeting

Participation in Fed roundtables is by invitation, and the group was deliberately kept small so the conversation can stay candid and specific.

Attendees receive a short set of discussion questions and a roster roughly a week in advance, but participants are not expected to prepare formal presentations. The format is a conversation.

The Kansas City Fed holds sessions like this one periodically across its district to hear from the operations closest to production agriculture, in language that has not been through a survey instrument first.

Wyoming is one of seven states in the Tenth Federal Reserve District, along with Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, northern New Mexico, and western Missouri. It is also a state whose agriculture, heavily weighted toward cow-calf and stocker operations, irrigated hay, and rangeland grazing on a mix of private, state, and federal ground, does not always show up clearly in district-level numbers that also reflect large areas of row-crop agriculture.