Matt Roberts, Ph.D.

The end of 2024 and the start of 2025 have unprecedented amounts of change and risk for the economy. The instability of the political landscape is changing daily, meaning that both the Presidency and Congress are up for grabs in 2024, between parties with starkly different visions of what economic policy should look like. Into this mix, we throw the fact that the Farm Bill expired in 2023, receiving a one-year extension into 2024 and Congress is far from coming together on its replacement. What are the risks to the economy, the stock market and your farm or business from the election? What will the new farm bill look like? Dr. Roberts will spell all this out, and provide useful steps to position your operation to thrive.

Whether corn, soybeans, wheat, cattle, hogs, interest rates or energy, the last decade has seen as much market chaos as at any point in our lifetimes. As consumer (and voter) tastes continue to change, and the world moves away from globalization, we are entering a new era for agriculture and the economy. Dr. Roberts will explain the forces at work in the world and how they will move the numbers that matter to your audience.

In a world wracked by war, COVID-19, accelerating inflation, bull and bear markets, and increasing division and political strife, how can position our farms and businesses to take advantage of the opportunities that exist. What can we learn from past price boom cycles and how to apply it to today? Are we in a demand-driven or supply-driven bull market? What does that mean for your marketing decisions, and how does that change if you are a grain, livestock, or dairy producer, or an input supplier? Join us to hear how Dr. Roberts will bring this together with insight and humor and walk away with actionable insight to make our businesses more profitable and resilient. 

From Brexit to the US Election to China to KORUS to USMCA, trade is hot again. But like so much of economics, just because trade is easy to talk about doesn’t mean it is simple to understand. American policy-makers have spent the last 50 years negotiating free trade agreements, while economists have cheered them on, chanting ‘trade makes everyone better off.’ But if that’s the case, why are so many Americans so certain that the truth is entirely different? Dr. Roberts helps audiences understand how and why trade benefits the economy, but also who it helps and who it hurts. Most importantly, Dr. Roberts will help the audience understand the policies that we need to pursue as a country so that everyone can benefit from the global market, not just a few. This talk is appropriate for a wide range of audiences, from civic clubs to lender meetings, and is easily specialized to address the opportunities, challenges, and policies for any industry.  

After teaching and consulting with farmers of all sizes and types for over 20 years, and an even longer time spent in business, Roberts will help your audience understand the business, economic, and agricultural principles that will set them apart from their competitors and help them succeed in coming decades.

The first two decades of the new century have been filled with historic moves by any measure. Prices have been more volatile than ever, and so have consumers. We’ve seen Brazil’s become a leader in global agricultural production and China become the leader in global food consumption. Given all this, what is a producer to do? This session will summarize where we find ourselves and where we are going and lay out practical steps that every producer can do to increase their probability of survival in the 21^st century. Dr. Roberts will touch on bookkeeping, financial decision-making, and household living expenses, providing benchmarks against which producers can compare themselves in planning the futures of their farms.

Low prices make for stressful marketing decisions. High prices make for even more stressful marketing decisions. Dr. Roberts will lay out the national and global causes of current prices, the outlook for the next 6-24 months, and, most importantly, marketing strategies and decisions that producers can use to balance risk and rewards being presented by the market.

The years 2006-2012 will always be remembered by those in the commodity markets. Strong demand for all commodities drove prices to never before seen heights. Those high prices and the resulting profitability drove investment decisions and policy choices long enough to create real obstacles to readjusting when the inevitable crash came. Dr. Roberts starts by explaining why commodities—all commodities, whether corn, soybeans, milk, beef, oil or copper—will always have booms and busts, and what producers and/or end-users need to do right now to make it through, as well as what they need to remember the next time around. This talk inevitably combines strategy and finance with the market conditions and near and intermediate-term outlook for the industry at hand. This topic is applicable to agricultural commodities and fossil fuels, as well as lenders and suppliers. Dr. Roberts’ expertise and background makes this a particularly powerful talk for farmers and small businesses.

Ethanol continues to consume 35% of US corn production, but as the collapse in driving and fuel usage reminded us, that market is tied to consumer fuels demand. We often hear of the increases in hybrid vehicles, fuel economy standards, and battery technology that will soon render the internal combustion engine (ICE) obsolete, illegal, or both. Growing up as a car guy in the family Chevrolet dealership, and still spending too much time and money on his own (converted to E85) track car, this is a topic that is near and dear to Dr. Roberts’ heart. We’ll dissect the growth of the market for electric vehicles, the barriers to their adoption, and the forecasts for future market share. We’ll then turn to the future of ICEs and close with what it all means for agricultural markets.

Few things cause more worry among the ag industry than the rise of ‘adjectives’—local, organic, natural, free-range—in food production. Dr. Roberts will help audiences understand why consumers no longer care about ‘safe and affordable food’ and why simply trying to convince them to abandon ‘adjective-laden’ (vegan, organic, local, paleo, etc) foods are doomed. For the ag industry, this isn’t bad news, it’s good news; as these paths provide opportunities for the agricultural industry to be more successful and profitable by reversing the trend of ever-shrinking consumer spending on food. This talk is particularly suitable for any ag or food-related audience and includes audience participation polls to help listeners understand their role as consumers.

In 2016, Millennials overtook Generation X as the largest segment of the workforce, but now in 2022, the youngest Millennials are in their mid-20s. If you thought Millennials were hard to understand, wait until you try to get the attention of Generation Z. To hear many managers and owners speak, kids these days are a lazy, entitled, social-media obsessed bunch of whiners, running from job to job with a phone full of photographs of their participation ribbons. These younger generations obviously disagree, citing themselves as the most creative, educated, socially aware generation in the history of humanity. What is the truth?  Dr. Roberts draws on his experiences as a father of four, a premature grandfather, fifteen years teaching and advising students at OSU, and his own experiences hiring, mentoring, leading, and firing millennials at 5.life, a chain of four indoor rock climbing gyms in Ohio and Pennsylvania of which he’s the CEO and co-owner. In this talk, he’ll help audiences understand how the world that today’s kids have grown up in has shaped their attitudes, desires, and motivation. Through that lens, Dr. Roberts will give participants new ways to relate to and motivate younger employees. Any business audience can benefit from this talk. Although much of the context is services, the content can be adapted to include useful content for an audience’s specific industry.