selling crops

Is anyone else having trouble selling their crops? I have great clean one year from certified oats, first cut round bale hay, and great second cut rounds. Ive been advertising for months and have got nothing. Im worried i wont be able to sell the corn or beans either, let alone pay the bills it took to plant them. Just wandering if anyone else is having problems.

No crops to sell here in Iowa

Hay and other crops were poor in nothern Indaiana, parts of Michigan. If you have transport facilities, and networking abilities...

Where are you at in pa? Around here hay is a pricing game. No one wants to sell cheap due to costs, and the high prices we hit last year. No one really wants to buy unless they have to. Dont get too worried about the hay. As soon as the frost hits, the hay market changes real quick. The oats might sell now, or at spring planting...

How can you not find someone to buy the corn and beans? All our elevators around here buy.

I can't give my hay away around here! I just bush-hog it down.

I was told many years ago concerning selling hay, that you'll sell more hay after March 1 than before it.

south western pa. i keep dropping my prices but no bites

Greg, where you at from CR?

Supply and demand, supply and demand. Hay was like gold here last week. Then it rained 4" from hurricane Issac. But it takes a while for the grass to recover.

Do you not have a grain elevator/buyer in your area?

That is a big part of farming. You dont produce or grow a crop if you have no potential market for it.

Around here, you grow corn, soybeans, or wheat, then you take it to the elevator and they buy it. Now granted you might not like the price, but they buy it.

Now If I decided to grow flax seed, and didn't check ahead, then took my crop to the elevator, they are probably gonna send me packin' cause we dont have a market here for flax, or mint, or cranberries.

You grow what you can sell.

Gene

Gene, down here it is next to impossible to buy a bale of hay. Most of the places that in years past who sold it do not have so much as a bale they will sell a person. If you can find it you will pay between $75-100 per bale for the rounds

Randy you are just jumping the gun. Since you are trying to direct sell the oats and hay you need to wait until people need it. Most people will use up all of their pasture and then start feeding hay. Then go and buy hay. So you are just early for the hay season. Here it usually starts after the first real good freeze, about the first of Nov.

Your oats can be sold several ways. 1) Bag them and sell them directly to horse people. This would be highest price but much more work. 2) Find a local feed mill that uses oats in their feeds. Sell the oats whole sale to them. 3) Wait until spring to sell them as cheap seed oats for cover crop for new seedings of hay/water ways. The price would be less than the horse people but a little more than the feed mill route.

The corn and soybeans will be easier to market as there should be grain elevators around that will buy them from you. The down side is you will just have to take the market price the day you deliver them. It should be good this year but not always.

You are finding out the biggest thing that a farmer/producer has to learn. You have to have a market for what every you grow. You don't grow some thing and not know before you start where you are going to sell it. There are hundreds of crops/animals that would grow on my farm here. The hard part is growing the ones that will make me the most profit at my location. I have seen many guys try something wildly different. Then the market fell through and they lost all the work an inputs.

There are kind of three legs of the stool of being a real good farmer.

1) Be good producer. You have to have good quality and yield to make it.

2) Be a good marketer. You have to get a good price for the fruit of your labor and investment. I got to see a lot of farmers balance sheets while I was selling equipment. The biggest difference I could see between the successful farmers and those that struggled was marketing.

3) Be a good manager. This is of your money, your time, your machinery, and the land. You have to do all of these as well as you can. If not success will be hard to accomplish.

> i keep dropping my prices but no bites

Try upping your prices and the phone will ring off the hook. Seriously.

My wife was trying to sell some ducks for $5 for about a month an nobody called. She lowered the price to $4 and still nobody called. She raised the price to $7 and the phone started ringing. The ducks all sold within a day. Same strategy works for auctioneers too, I guess.

The only times I have ever had to buy hay it was in the spring and I screwed up my calculations. If you want to sell hay, the prime market is right before the grass starts growing. The thing about farmers is we're all eternal optimists (to a fault)... or maybe it's eternal procrastinators. I can never remember which.

I did have a market for all of it, until it came harvest time. Had one Guy from Texas that wanted all the hay I could get and another that uses oats in his feed that wanted it all. The Guy from Texas wont return my calls and the other bought oats from someone else.

If you have a means of tucking them, my local feed mill(mercer county) paid $4 for oats a few weeks back which was about 50 cents more than CBOT at the time. I heard of $5 at more distant places.


Now if you are asking some ridiculous price that you see at TSC or Walmart for oats it is anyone's guess if you will ever sell them.

If you can deliver to NE I'll take all you bring me.

Had a little extra hay here in MN and decided to try selling about 50 bales for a little extra cash. Put an ad on craig's list for $50 per bale on 900lb round bales of clover, orchard, timithy, brome mix. Sold 53 bales in 6 hours.

How much are you asking for your Oats? Bagged or bulk?

Asking $4.50 for oats. Bulk is easier but I can bag them

It sounds like when I sold firewood, people wouldn't call untill they had the last armful next to the furnace. I delivered most of my firewood during evening hours and below zero temps.
Be patient the crops will sell.