September 18, 2007

 

Harvest begins for biggest US corn crop 

 

 

Waiting to unload corn at a grain elevator, Kyle Winkelmann took a few minutes to marvel at how rain had fallen on his central Illinois fields at just right times this season.

 

Before he could finish talking, though, Winkelmann was headed back to his fields near Tallula, a dozen miles northwest of Springfield, trying to keep up with the combines.

 

"I keep hauling corn and hauling corn and hauling corn and never get anywhere, you know?" Winkelmann joked during a phone conversation last week. "I'm not really complaining."

 

That's because there's a lot of corn in his fields, and in others all over the Midwest.

 

The US Department of Agriculture on Wednesday (September 12) raised its already-high expectations for the crop to 13.3 billion bushels, which would be an all-time high and 27 percent more than last year's 10.5 billion bushels.

 

Those figures don't usually mean much outside of farm country, but the size of this year's crop figures heavily in two areas Americans who don't farm tend to think about a lot: fuel and the price of food.

 

Farmers planted so much corn - 92.9 million acres, almost 20 percent more than last year - to meet the demand for the fuel additive ethanol. And economists say the diversion of corn from livestock and poultry feed is likely to drive up food prices for at least a few years.

 

Iowa farmers, the country's top corn producers, are expected to harvest 2.54 billion bushels this year, 24 percent more than in 2006, according to the USDA. In Illinois, the No. 2 corn producer, farmers are expected to harvest 2.34 billion bushels, 29 percent more corn than last year. And No. 3 corn producer Nebraska is expected to produce 1.51 billion bushels, a 28 percent increase.

 

For part of the summer, some farmers and crop watchers wondered whether hot, dry weather would take a bite out of the corn harvest.

 

Parts of the Midwest, including southern Illinois, eastern Indiana and some sections of Iowa, veered into drought.

 

University of Illinois crop expert Emerson Nafziger chalks up much of the Midwest's apparent corn success this year to the fabled black soil found across much of Illinois and into Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota.

 

The silt clay loam holds an extraordinary amount of moisture, he said, even when the air above is 95 degrees and dry for days on end.

 

This year, he said, a lot of farmers he talks to reported 8 inches of rain or less between planting and the start of harvest. Corn, he said, needs about 22 inches to do well.

 

"That means 14 came from somewhere," he said. "There are not many soils in the world that would provide two-thirds of the moisture that a crop needs."

 

It will be several more weeks before the harvest ends and the country knows how farmers fared during the first big year of what they hope is an ethanol boom.

 

Ethanol demand has increased rapidly the past few years with increases in gasoline prices and calls for alternatives to oil-based fuels. Grain farmers in turn increasingly see corn as a moneymaker.

 

"If this ethanol takes off like it could, the price of corn's gonna be really good for a few years," Winkelmann said.