At mid-afternoon Tuesday, corn planting concluded on Doug Strickler’s farms. Other area farmers are at about the same stage.
“We had a good, smooth planting season once the ground dried,” Strickler said
He started on March 30, a little later than usual because of rainfall, which set the stage with good moisture in the seedbed. “We could use another rain in a day or two,” Stickler said. It appears from today’s forecast that will occur.
Warmer than usual weather helped the planting, with it completed a week ahead of “when we like to be done,” he said.
This year’s start to fall crops farming was similar to 2011’s.
“It went well then, too,” Strickler recalled, though not fondly. “When the corn came up it was the best stand we’d had in years — kind of scary, I thought.”
His apprehension was well-founded. By early summer the area was gripped by the worst drought in 50 years.
Even so, harvest was not a total disaster.
“We had some corn that made 20 to 25 bushels (an acre), but there also was some that we got in early on bottom ground next to the river that made better than 200 bushels,” Strickler said.
To put those yields in perspective, input costs for seed, fertilizer and chemicals alone are about $275 an acre. When machinery, for planting and harvest, interest, depreciation and land costs are added to the mix, the expense to plant, raise and harvest an acre of corn soars to about $400.
Corn did jump to the $8 a bushel range last fall, when the harvest was shorter than anticipated, but even at that the first 50 bushels went completely for direct costs of the crop. This year, with the outlook at this point good, December futures for corn are at $5.50 a bushel. If that is an accurate predictor for harvest time, corn making 80 bushels an acre would be a financial wash.
IN TODAY’S high-tech environment, most farmers target planting of corn and soybeans — the main cash crops — to take advantage of soil type and fertilizer application.
When he was younger and riding on an open-air tractor with diesel fumes filling his nostrils, Strickler said the standard was to apply the same amount of fertilizer throughout a field and plant about 21,000 seeds per acre in cornfields.
Nowadays, fields are divided into grids of five acres with soil sample determining how much fertilizer should be put down in each area of the field.
“We take the gird map to Midwest Fertilizer (his choice) and they plug it into their GPS (global positioning system) computer,” he said, which has the applicating vehicle dispense fertilizer according to what is needed in each area of a field.
