Growers: Keep Trying For 2015 Or Give Up?
July 13, 2015 With apologies to our friends in California, many of the country’s crop fields, particularly in the Midwest, seem to in varying states of saturation. Driving to a recent event held by Dow AgroSciences in Indianapolis, IN, in early July, I was amazed by how many soybean and corn fields I saw that were under water or had plants in them barely a few inches high.
And this state of the crops in the Midwest was apparently anything but isolated. During the Dow AgroSciences event, one of the speakers was Andrew Ferrel, commercial agronomist for Mycogen Seeds. According to Ferrel, most of his contacts in the important “I” states (Illinois, Iowa and Indiana) were reporting less than ideal crop conditions for corn and soybean because of the exceptionally wet spring each was experiencing.
Later in the event, a panel discussion featuring growers from across the Midwest echoed this view. “Most of my neighbors had to pick between planting or applying nitrogen, and they picked planting,” said John Davis, an Ohio grower. “Now, it’s almost too late for them to consider applying any nitrogen to their fields because they are too wet.”
Loading ...Doug Morrow, a grower from Indiana, agreed that time was running short for growers to decide whether or not to try to save their crops for 2015. “Everyone I know is asking themselves right now if they should spend more money to try to get something in or do they walk away and take their crop insurance,” said Morrow. “July 15th is the magical date to make this decision. After that, you are basically done.”
It will be interesting to see how many growers decide to cash in their crop insurance for 2015, and obviously, this could have a serious impact on ag retailer fortunes for the rest of the year. As Jeff WanderWerff, a Michigan grower, pointed out, recent commodity prices are working against any incentive to do more. “At $7 corn, I have room to wiggle and spend more money to save my crops,” said WanderWerff. “But that’s not the case with $3 corn.”
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