Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | It's always dangerous to extrapolate local & regional conditions to the whole country but I've been wondering about the possibility of a lot more bean acres myself. The seed salespeople I've talked to won't put numbers to it but bean seed sales are very strong and corn pretty weak. It almost seems as if corn seed sales are so weak that some of the seed companies almost give you the impression of having "given up".
But not only that, I've been pushing the pencil pretty hard and the truth of the matter is, the risk-reward for beans here at least looks a lot better than corn. That's not saying I might not make more money with corn but amount of cash money at risk is just much less with beans.
The other thing that colors the situation here is the price of milk and the fact that the local ethanol plant can so easily access Midwestern corn by rail. The price of milk is so low that dairy farmers are having trouble even paying the prevailing price. Plus, with access to plentiful Midwest corn by rail, the local ethanol plant has no reason to raise their bid whatsoever. And from all reports there's no wait time at all to dump at the ethanol plant, in fact you need to schedule your truck deliveries simply because when they're dump rail corn, there's no room to unload. In contrast, you can still get $10 cash for beans.
So, given the choice to grow something, corn that nobody really seems to want, as opposed to something, beans that people still seem to, what's the answer. |
90+million acres of soybeans
