Producers from Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska sat down with Federal Reserve economists on Sept. 24 at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for a two-hour regional roundtable on agricultural economic conditions.

John Hewlett, ranch and farm management specialist in the University of Wyoming's Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, organized Wyoming's participation in the session. He worked directly with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, whose territory covers the region, to bring the state's producers to the table.

Hewlett identified and recruited a cross section of operators intended to reflect the breadth of agriculture in Wyoming. He will also contribute to the session discussions himself, drawing on his extension work in farm and ranch management.

Two extension colleagues from neighboring states assembled participants from their respective territories. Jay Parsons of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Stephen Koontz of Colorado State University rounded out the tri-state recruiting effort.

The roundtable format gives Federal Reserve economists direct contact with producers, a channel the Kansas City Fed has long used to supplement its formal surveys of farm credit and rural economic conditions. For the operators involved, the session offers a chance to signal how input costs, credit conditions and commodity prices are playing out on the ground across the High Plains.

The meeting took place amid continued pressure on farm margins in the region, where livestock operations and crop producers alike have faced elevated input costs in recent years. No specific policy outcomes or survey results were attached to the Sept. 24 session, which functioned as an information-gathering discussion rather than a decision-making body.

Organizers have not said when the economists' takeaways from the roundtable might feed into Federal Reserve commentary or rural credit reporting. Future sessions of the regional roundtable series would likely follow the same producer-recruitment model Hewlett, Parsons and Koontz used for this gathering.