The August heat and dry weather took a toll on the corn crop, and that’s putting a squeeze on livestock and ethanol producers. The U.S. Agriculture Department today slashed its estimate of this year’s corn harvest to under 12.5 billion bushels. That’s a full 3 percent below what the department had forecast just a month ago.Right now, 148 bpa looks pretty good to me.
Because of that smaller crop, which has pushed up market prices sharply, both livestock producers and ethanol plants are going to use less grain than previously expected, and exports are likely to be lower as well, the USDA said. This eyear’s harvest would still be the third largest on record, but that’s apparently not large enough to keep up with the growing demand for grain.
The USDA cut Iowa’s projected yield to 167 bushels a month, 10 bushels an acre off last month’s estimate. Nationally, the projected yield was cut by nearly five bushels to 148.1 bushels an acre.
Monday, September 12, 2011
USDA Lowers Corn Forecast
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Remember when I commented how green everything was in the middle of August here in Minnesota? Well there has been no rain since then and things are not so green anymore.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the local sweet corn had nicely developed ears except for an unpollinated "tip" about 1.5" long. This happened several times from different stands so I wonder if those ears didn't fall victim from excessive late pollination heat. Who would have thought that corn was so fussy?
Crazy growing year and yesterday I saw a pretty large field being chopped for silage. It looked like the farmer was trying to get a crop of corn but was bailing out. Guy had made a LARGE amount of silage—he better have a bunch of cows close by.
That is what happened to us in July and August. We have some corn tipped back 2 or 3 inches.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine that whoever is chopping a bunch of silage does have a lot of cows, and may not have had enough of a hay crop this year. We had a pretty poor second and third cutting.