Finished yet?

Is everyone finished with this years harvest? If so what kind of year did you have and what are you going to do next year with the markets the way they are?

I finished Saturday. Very good yields here have helped to make up for low prices. My 3300 was a bit of a struggle in hilgh yield corn so I went out and bought a 4420. I was wanting one of those for some time now. I am planning the same acreage for next yr but a bit more hay. The hay market here is still holding up so a newer haybine if one comes my way. I do some trading on the CME but right now I am underwater on beans. I don't expect them to keep going up but that is my opinion. Also holding off on prepay for inputs. Wait and see attitude.

Finished picking corn Wednesday. I've got a bunch of stalks cut and raked. Hope to bale tomorrow and chop enough to fill the top of the barn for bedding Tuesday. Been the most exasperating year I can ever remember,but the corn yields were out of this world despite the moisture being high. In fact,I had some that just wasn't drying and I went back to chopping and feeding it up. I finished that Thursday morning.

S.C. Mn. corn 171 bpa. Beans 44 bpa. Stay the course for next year. 2/3 corn. 1/3 beans. Finished about 2 weeks ago.

Finished a week ago Thursday nite/ Friday morning.

Yields were down. Corn ears were very thin around, long and dry and high test weight, but thin. And then the windstorm, lost a bunch there.

I stored perhaps 2/3 corn, 1/2 beans, gonna wait for $3.50 corn before selling. Anyhow, that generally how it turns out, might not be the plan....

Paul

Let's say you get 3.50 for the corn. Less input and harvest costs, what would your net be?

Paul, I have a good friend that feeds out a lot of cattle, he was telling me today that his feed supplier told him that if they did away with ethenal this year that you would see $2.50 corn next year. This is probably a big boat load of B.S. but is this not what you have kind of thought for quite a while now?

NO! My corn got laid down by wind, and Dad and I have been picking it by hand. Its only 10 acres but maddening! Crawl around on your hands and knees till you get a pickup bed full and then shovel it into the combine. Got about 2 acre's to go, then load up the combine and go get my 15 acres of beans. I missed out on renting 300 acres for next year, and have had my pouting face on about for a week or two. Dad asked me today what I would do if I had 150 acres of corn laid on the ground, and 150 acres of beans still to be cut. After thinking about for a minute, I decided that being a play farmer may not be that bad after all.

Markets are driven by rumors. Doesn't have to happen, just be talked about.

China, food processors, cattle and hog operations all like that it is talked about......

It would be highly unlikely, about impossible that ethanol is eliminated. We need the octane as they are making 84 octane raw gas now. And we need the pollution improvements ethanol gives, EPA is too big to be denied from having an active in gasoline for this.

But the rumor will lower prices.

China just cancelled some corn contracts they bought a bit ago today. Lowered the market. We know china needs corn, they will be buying from someone someday soon, but it affects the market.

A 3-4 corn market, without the wild swings, probably would be a good thing. Be a little hard to adjust to, fertilizer and seed costs would need to adjust, but we would get there.

2.50 corn would be tough. With the price of tires, the price of fertilizer, the price of iron, the price of fuel, I think the world is in worse trouble with 2.50 corn than it would be in with 8.00 corn......

Back on the 60s dad paid 25 cents for a gallon of fuel, he paid 78 for a tractor tire, he paid 2000 for the tractor, fertilizer was 7 cents a lb. minimum wage was what a buck an hour?

He got 2.00 for a bu of corn.

I know farming is different, and tractors are bigger, number of acres is bigger, but the fixed costs have really grown in the past 10 years. I don't think we can live on 1960s wages. Not sure anyone in a factory would want to either.

Drastically lowering ethanol use would drop corn prices.

That would switch everyone to cheaper to raise soybeans and wheat.

Which would drop their prices too.

That would really have some 5 year ripple effects all around the world.

Funny thing is it wouldn't even change corn needs all that much. We only pull the starch out of the corn, the rest still goes to livestock feed or export anyhow.

The nice thing ethanol has done for corn is in my area, we grow 40-50% more corn than we need, and the river freezes up solid right at harvest time, so we have very poor markets for corn until late spring. Shippers and rail roads make more on corn than those of us in the upper upper Midwest.... Ethanol plants give us a local destination for corn, so the basis is much better. I don't care so much about the CBOT national price. It is the local basis price that matters to me. Ethanol has helped that local basis a great deal.

But, I guess I went all over the place there. We have about saturated the current market for ethanol. If we continue to use a little less gasoline with better mpg and less driving, the use of ethanol will also have to drop.

That is kinda what is going on. Some have wanted to make a bigger story out of that than it is.

Paul

Beans just beat insurance. They were second crop for the most part. The wheat was really hit and miss. Some fields were better than anyone could remember, but some were full of weeds and hit 30 and that was it. There was one field east of the house that smelled just like a pasture mowing. The weeds were just that thick in spots.

Getting 30 for wheat is a little discouraging which is funny because grandpa would have killed for that when he started farming. How times have changed.

Some dry land fields close to my folks hit 100 bpa. That is just almost unfathomable for Kansas. Keeps a combine on its toes for sure.

We are still on the tail of a three year drought. I hope it breaks. So many batches of hay are poor due to weeds. The grass was just so stressed after last year that the weeds got a hold. There's going to be a lot of hay ground around here sprayed in the spring (and not just mine). Decent rounds of broke mix brought $27 at the sale this week. What a difference a year makes.

Huge sigh! Baled stalks yesterday,chopped a few loads. Finished chopping this morning in a little bit of freezing pellets of rain. Got done before it turned to liquid. I'M DONE FOR THE YEAR!

Where I live in north central Illinois stuff was pretty good. If rained like hell all spring and we were late planting then the rain stopped, didn't get a drop till the first week of August, then 3 inches came at once. That made our corn crop. Out of 500 acres of corn about 460 averaged 230s. A 40 acre patch of white timber clay went 152, so all and all impressive. 100 acres of beans on corn stalks went 53 witch was good. 212 acres of beans that was in corn the last 6 years broke 70 bushels an acre, a record for us for beans. We finished a month ago, then I took on a custom job south of here where they got no rain at all. As I went thru the field I could see where he side dressed 28%. That corn went 182 and the beans right there went 42. The beans on sand was another story, there wasn't much there. I don't know what he's doing next year but we are planting 2/3 corn and 1/3 soybeans