CROP UPDATE

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I mainly want to update you on how we think the crop is doing and how the markets are reacting to it.  Here in Boone County, Indiana, it is still hard to tell exactly how bad our crop is hurt.  The crop looks a lot better, but we are being careful about how we evaluate that.  Part of the reason the corn looks better is simply because the edges of the field are tall enough to block the view of the bad spots, so our minds don’t get reminded as often.  Also, it is just a fact that tasseled corn looks better than corn before tasseling.  The soybeans look pretty good, except for the areas that are just completely gone from flooding.  In general, we are more optimistic about the crop than we have been, but we know that it is still hurt.

The whammy for Indiana is that the nationwide crop looks good, so the prices are not reflecting the fact that our yields will be down.  The USDA put out it’s crop condition report this past week and it said that we in Indiana, Ohio, and part of Illinois are the minority.  Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota are on track to have very good crops and each of them grow much more corn than Indiana.  The USDA actually is predicting 11 states to have record corn crops… wow!  It is so hard not to look out your back door and assume it’s representative of the entire crop.

Our group from Indiana Farm Bureau at the USDA in DC.

Indiana Farm Bureau gave me the opportunity to actually go to DC and be there for the crop report (is that exciting stuff or what!).  It actually was a very cool experience.  We went to this “super secret, super secure” room somewhere in the basement of the USDA.  There were about 70 people in this room where an under-secretary of agriculture came in and signed the report about 11:15am.  The report is made public at 12:00 noon.  So here we are looking at this report that says we may have the third largest corn crop in history nationwide.  We so badly wanted to call home and tell our families to sell corn and beans!  As soon as the report was out, beans dropped 60 cents and corn was down about 25 cents.

So… we are trying to be optimistic but at this moment, production looks to be down and the prices are not great either.  One thing for sure, we will not really know until the combines start to roll.