Protecting harvested grains more vital this year

VAN WERT — With drought-impacted yields expected to be poor at best for many Ohio farms this year, grow­ers need to take extra care to ensure that every bushel they’re able to har­vest is pro­tected against mold, pests and other prob­lems that can ruin what grains they’ve man­aged to har­vest, said an Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Exten­sion educator.

After the long, hot sum­mer farm­ers have suf­fered through, with drought con­di­tions and low top­soil mois­ture neg­a­tively impact­ing yields, pro­tect­ing every sin­gle bushel that does get har­vested should be high on every grower’s pri­or­ity list, said Cur­tis Young, who is also an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Col­lege of Food, Agri­cul­tural, and Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences at Ohio State.

To pro­tect the qual­ity and eco­nomic value of the grain, grow­ers need to take extra care to pre­pare grain har­vest­ing, han­dling and stor­age equip­ment and struc­tures for the corn and soy­beans that will soon be har­vested, he said.

“You don’t have money in the bank until you sell the grain,” Young said. “The pro­tec­tion of the grain doesn’t stop with har­vest, so if you are stor­ing the grain on your farm, you need to take care of it.

“That extra care for grain stor­age is espe­cially inten­si­fied this year because yields are going to be sub-optimal, so grow­ers need to pro­tect every penny that they can.”

It appears that corn pro­duc­tion will drop 13 per­cent to a six-year low, the U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture said ear­lier this month.

In its lat­est crop report, the USDA cut its pro­jected U.S. corn pro­duc­tion to 10.8 bil­lion bushels, down 17 per­cent from its fore­cast last month of nearly 13 bil­lion bushels and 13 per­cent lower than last year. Soy­bean pro­duc­tion is fore­cast to be down as well, to 2.69 bil­lion bushels, which is 12 per­cent lower than last year, as well as lower than the 3.05 bil­lion bushels the USDA fore­cast last month.

The pro­jec­tions mean this year’s corn pro­duc­tion will be the low­est since 2006, with soy­bean pro­duc­tion at its low­est rate since 2003. The USDA said it expects corn grow­ers to aver­age 123.4 bushels per acre, down 24 bushels from last year, while soy­bean grow­ers are expected to aver­age 36.1 bushels per acre, down 5.4 bushels from last year.

In Ohio, those num­bers trans­late into a pro­jected yield of 126 bushels per acre, which is down 32 bushels per acre from last year for corn. Soy­beans are pro­jected at 42 bushels per acre, down from last year’s 47.5 bushels per acre yield.

“The fact is that grain this year is more valu­able that it has been in past years and grain prices are his­tor­i­cally higher than they’ve ever been,” Young said. “And with lim­ited yields expected this year, what grains grow­ers are able to har­vest will be their income for the year, so it is imper­a­tive for them to pro­tect that grain.”

For exam­ple, grow­ers who typ­i­cally pro­duced 180 bushels of corn per acre and sold the crop at $3.30 per bushel, they would gen­er­ate $594 per acre in gross income, he said.

“So with the higher prices corn is fetch­ing this year, say $8.25 per bushel, grow­ers who want to gen­er­ate that same income would need to pro­duce a min­i­mum of 72 bushels per acre to break even,” Young said. “But unfor­tu­nately, there are fields out there that may not gen­er­ate even 72 bushels per acre this year.”

To pro­tect their har­vest, grow­ers need to ensure that all pieces of equip­ment used in har­vest­ing the grain be cleaned, inspected and repaired sev­eral weeks prior to the begin­ning of the har­vest season.

Posted by Rachel Lloyd on Oct 4 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.