Let me just say that the road has been long. This past week your loyal scribe marked his 39th year of writing this column. It is 2025 now and I can remember very clearly 25 years ago when the new century changed how many of us thought that was like science fiction. My goodness, if that is science fiction, I don't know what 2025 is.

Of course, the simple fact is that many of the readers and people that were with me then back in 1986 are gone now. I was a young kid of 27 years old not knowing much about the world but feverishly trying to find out. Back in those days there was no internet, computers were very rudimentary, and we didn't have the mass communication which, of course, we have today. Back in those days on the farm, we had graduated to the CB radios versus yelling across the field. If you dropped that young farm kid from 1986 into last week on the farm, he wouldn't even know where he was.

Today, my tractors have the ability to auto steer through the fields which have been prepared with fertility prescriptions using GPS and a whole host of other technologies not even thought of in 1986. Of course, back in those days writing a column involved pushing a pen across some lined paper. In 2025, the relevance of the keyboard is long gone, having used voice recognition software for the better part of 15 years now. What is next? Well, you all know about AI, but I assure you what you're reading is me. So far, I haven't been kicked out of a job from an AI bot. However, lots of them exist in 2025 and I am sure that they are the future for many in a world churning with modern misinformation.

As you all know, this year we had tremendous crops in the United States. As I've documented many times, U.S. corn production is set to come in at 16.752 billion bushels (bb) in 2025. What was it in 1986 when I started writing the Agridome column? It was approximately 9 bb of corn. In 1988, it dropped down to 5 bb of corn under a devastating drought. Then, between 1990 and 1994 we danced around 7 bb to 8 bb of corn. In other words, today we have doubled corn production in the United States since I started writing this column so many years ago.

Production of course is one thing and demand is another. I find the production figure simply amazing, but I find the demand figures so much more so. For instance, corn usage this year in the U.S. is set to come in at 16.155 bb. In other words, we are using more than twice as much corn now in 2025 as we grew in 1986 when I started writing this column. That's incredible and it is testament to a world which despite all its warts has seen the global economy grow through the years.

Try to imagine for a moment 39 years from now. Looking back on what I've just written, will the U.S. corn crop in the year 2064 be double what it is now at approximately 32 bb? Will the corn demand be approximately 31.5 bb? It makes your head shake, doesn't it? It all just doesn't seem real, but that's the amount of change we're talking about over the life of this column.

In 1986, Brian Mulroney was Canada's prime minister. The Farm Debt Review Board had just been formed to help farmers avoid bankruptcy. There were still all kinds of memories of 23% interest rates which would last for the people who went through it -- even into today. Times changed and things got better. In the early days, we talked about things like NISA, GRIP and Farm Income Stabilization. Then we had BSE, ethanol, and the low-interest-rate era. We even saw the largest farm protest in Canadian history on April 6, 2006, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. I led the protest that day for English Canada, a moment I will never forget.

As I head toward the 40th year of writing this column, there's a small storm inside me now, just enough to remind me things aren't what they used to be. I want to thank all of my editors for their guidance over the many years. This agricultural world continues to change, and I will change with it. There still is a lot of agricultural economics out there. I look forward to telling that story.

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Philip Shaw can be reached at philip@philipshaw.ca

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