For crop farmers, winter is the offseason. But that doesn’t mean they take the winter off. It’s meeting season — going to endless seminars or having discussions about better ways to farm — and planning season.
Planning may seem like it would be a challenge given the trade uncertainties, including the tariff war with China.
That conflict has cost farmers billions in lost trade opportunities, especially affecting soybean farmers. Early estimates showed signs of a record soy crop in 2018, piles of which are now glutting the market. However, farmers’ plans may not change because farmers they can’t afford to alter the course.
Most of agronomist Stephanie Porter’s clients even bought their seeds by mid-December.
“The earlier they usually buy their seed, they can get discounts. So a lot of them have already made that decision,” said Porter, an agronomist with
Golden Harvest.
And for all the talk of a massive shift away from soybeans, which is one of the main commodities caught in the tariff rift, Porter said it’s not that simple. She expects some more farmers to plant corn in fields for a second year in a row, but said, “I think a lot of people that I talked to will just stay with what they’re doing and doing a corn/soybean rotation.”
Corn brings in more money for farmers at the moment, but it also costs more to grow (due to fertilizer and seed prices), she said. And some farmers rely on a crop rotation because it helps increase crop yields, which is important when farmers’ bottom lines have been tight the last two to three years. Every dollar earned on an acre counts.
‘You never know’
Grant Strom, who raises cattle and farms corn and soybeans in Knox County, Illinois, said his choices largely come down to “agronomic reasons.”
“I’d say 90 percent of our acres are pretty well fixed what we’re going to do, year in, year out,” said Strom, who also is the president of the
Knox County Farm Bureau.
Farmers make decisions based on what they know works, especially when they can’t influence outside factors like trade or Mother Nature.
“You never know when you’re going to have a 2012-type drought situation or 1993-type flooding situation. So you can’t really plan for those types of things. But doing the best you can with the information you got and the more information you can collect, the better off you are,” he said.
Strom’s sticking with corn and soybeans for the 2019 growing season, even though he acknowledged there is still a “burdensome supply” of soybeans and continued trade uncertainties.
China did buy some soybeans from the U.S. late last year after discussions between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, but the amount was less than 5 percent than what China had bought in 2017. As of Jan. 7, there was no formal trade deal for the upcoming season.
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