Most of Wisconsin’s 2.9 million acres of corn planted for grain are still in the field, waiting for the legions of combines that will strip the golden ears from the stalks and shell the kernels from the cobs.
Same for the 1.6 million acres of soybeans, long since denuded of their leaves and shivering in the fields across the state, awaiting a home in a grain bin, on a farm or a big grain storage yard.
Farmers are impatiently waiting for some of the moisture to evaporate from the kernels so they can charge ahead full blast, harvest the crop and put it in storage.
Grain harvest is late this year, and it’s all because of the cool spring, summer and fall. “We need a little of that global warming we hear so much about,” a Dane County corn grower recently said. “I really want to get the corn and beans harvested before the snow flies.”
A few acres of corn and maybe half of the soybeans had been harvested prior to this week and its sunny Sunday and Monday, but most of the grain still stands. And those acres that have been harvested are more because of impatient farmers rather than nature calling the tune.
“Normally we’d be pretty well done with the corn and beans by now,” says Phil Vasby of Vasby Farms in rural Cambridge. “Not this year. Maybe half the beans are in, and our corn is just getting started.”
Vasby was referring to the 4.6 million bushel storage that his 300 to 400 farmer customers will fill with grain from their southern Dane County farm fields. The grain is put in storage for later use or sale after having been run through the dryer to bring the moisture content down to 13 percent in soybeans and 15 percent in corn.
In order to clear the way for the trucks and wagons, Vasby Farms was combining and drying its own corn even though the moisture was running 28 percent to 32 percent. “That’s a bit wet,” Vasby says. “But everyone is going to come in at once, so we want to get our grain out of the way.”
Last week, Dennis Lund of Cambridge brought one wagon load of corn that tested at 26 percent moisture. “It will cost me 49.5 cents a bushel to have it dried, and that’s a lot,” Lund says. “But it ran at 212 bushels per acre yield. This will make up for the drying cost.”
Kevin Klahn of Brooklyn raises 3,100 acres of corn and 1,600 acres of soy beans, much of it on rented acreage across Dane County. He ran his first load of corn, testing at 30 percent moisture, through the dryer at about 2 p.m. Oct. 27. He had combined about half his beans, some with moisture at 16 percent to 18.5 percent, which he put through the dryer. “I never dried soybeans before,” Klahn says. “But I had to get going on the harvest.”
Klahn said he had been sampling corn all week trying to find fields with low moisture without much luck. As for the sunny days predicted for this week, Klahn said he didn’t think the nicer weather predicted for this week would bring the moisture down much but it would make grain farmers feel better.
Klahn mentions that some of his corn fields are full of various kinds of mold on the ears, something that can be serious when the corn is sold in commercial channels. And he’s not alone with his concern about molds.
Joe Lauer, UW Extension agronomist, says he’s been getting calls from across Wisconsin about mold on corn ears.
“It’s all because of the weather,” Lauer confirms. “July, corn’s big growing month, was one of the coolest ever, and from mid September on it’s been damp and cool.”
Lauer says the molds appearing on some corn, mostly corn that was planted after May 15, come in many colors – white, gray, green and pinkish – but they probably won’t have a major impact on the corn.
It’s the possibility of having mycotoxins, organisms that can’t be seen, that is causing concern and questions among farmers, Lauer explains. Mycotoxins are caused by weather extremes from cool to extended periods in the 90s, – something we haven’t had this year – so chances are mycotoxins won’t be a major problem, he says.
Tom Klahn, of Lodi, got most of his 350 acres of soybeans off the field before switching to corn on Oct. 26. Like most grain growers he got a bit impatient waiting for the weather to get better and was thinking about November storms and the possibility of snow.
Everyone in the corn and soybean business hopes that the sunny weather early this week would stick around and that they can get to serious combining. The down side will be that the lines will be long at the grain dryers as the farm trucks, tractors and wagons form a long line for unloading.
It also means that the country roads will be full of big, wide and slow machinery, something that might be a shock and danger to folks in a big hurry traveling those narrow roads.
Dairy Herd Removal
The ninth Cooperatives Working Together (CWT) dairy herd removal is nearing completion, and another 26,000 dairy cows will soon leave the nation’s dairy barns. The program was designed to reduce milk production in order to increase the milk price paid to dairy farmers.
No, it’s not a government program. Farmer members of CWT, about 70 percent of the nation’s milk producers, pay 10 cents per hundredweight on the milk they produce. The money goes into a pool and is paid out to farmers who apply under the program by bidding on the dollar figure they would accept to sell their herd. The maximum bid in the last two rounds of CWT was $5.25 per hundredweight of milk.
Since the first program in 2003, CWT has removed more than 475,000 cows that produced over 8.6 billion pounds of milk.
In the eighth round of CWT completed this past summer, 274 herds, 74,000 cows and 2,900 heifers, in 38 states left farms. The majority of the cows, 55,000, came from the west and southwest US with 8,600 cows from 84 herds leaving the Midwest. Wisconsin lost 21 herds.
Random calls, to the owners of four southern Wisconsin herds that left their farms this summer, brought forth these reasons for going out of dairying:
• The herds were small – 23, 28, 30 and 60 cows in size.
• Each farm will continue in business with cash crops, with one farm raising dairy steers.
• Three of the four farms still have heifers and might resume milking if the milk price goes up.
• The bad economics of dairying was the final factor in each case.
• Three of the four had been looking for an easy way to leave dairying because of advancing age and declining interest in milking cows. One dairyman said it was a spur-of-the-moment decision and is not sure it was the right one.
The question all across America’s dairyland is: how can we continue milking cows at a loss? The CWT has provided an “out” for many dairy producers and will probably continue, depending on the milk price. Meanwhile, other forms of supply management are surfacing.
At the moment the answer to higher milk prices on the farmer end is unclear, but there is surely a lot of thinking going on.
John F. Oncken is owner of Oncken Communications, a Madison-based agricultural information and consulting company. He can be reached at 608-222-0624 or e-mail him at jfodairy@chorus.net.
