Iowa has seen an unprecedented year of natural disasters, including more than 80 tornadoes, multiple derechos, and a 500-year flood in northwest Iowa. But even as the number of livestock lost to the storms has yet to be tallied, experts say they don’t anticipate those losses to spike prices at the grocery store.

“When you think about the flooding, the hail damage, the loss of animals that we’ve seen thus far, while it’s big on a local and regional scale, it really won’t affect national production,” said Dr. Chad Hart, a professor of Economics and Extension Economist at Iowa State University. “Unless it truly affects national production, it doesn’t have an impact on crop prices.”

According to Hart, even if the natural disasters were to have an impact on crop prices, only about 15-20 percent of that price that consumers see at the grocery store actually goes back to buy the products off the farm.

“The idea is that you can have a fairly big movement in farm prices and that still doesn’t necessarily mean a big movement in food prices, and vice versa,” said Hart.

However, there are potential consequences from the flooding and crop damage that could be felt at a bigger level and potentially at the grocery store. According to Hart, the infrastructure damage left behind from the storms and flooding could create an increase due to shipping costs.

“For example, the rail line along the Iowa/South Dakota border that was damaged, it’s going to take months, if not a year to put that back online,” said Hart. “As we have to reroute and ship things around that bottleneck, that’s going to add to our shipping cost and that’s actually more likely to have an impact on food pricing than what we’re seeing due to the losses due to the natural disaster.”

According to Hart, there have been recent instances in which disasters within the agriculture industry have been seen in spikes at the grocery store, including the avian flu outbreak which has killed more than 92.3 million birds since 2022. The number of birds killed and the loss of egg production was big enough, said Hart, to be seen by consumers.

“We’re already staring at some really high food prices right now because of inflation over the past two to three years,” said Hart. “That heightens any concerns that people have around disasters and if it’s going to continue to spike prices It does take some very extreme impacts for it to fully translate, and while the flooding and natural disasters have been substantial and cause pain here in Iowa, it’s not of the scale that would typically translate into higher prices at the grocery store.”