OT Corn Piles

A while back, someone asked; if we have such a large corn crop, where are all the corn piles you usually see. Friday swmbo and I drove from home( Rock Island County, Ill. near Muscatine, Ia.) to Alton, Ill. We went over to Monmouth and drove down 67. I saw one small pile at Rushville, Ill, maybe 1/4 of the height of the conveyor and another coming back on 267 at Greenfield, a pretty good sized pile covered with a white covering. Several semi trucks hauling grain on 67 headed to Beardstown. Did not see any corn left to harvest. Chris

this fall seen barges unload at dubuque. was wondering how much is going to ethonal . around my area there is a lot of new super size grain bins

Saw about 150 acre field still up just outside of Serena , Illinois just yesterday.

Very few piles in MN from what we have seen...so many farmers could not get into fields to plant corn - so that ground went into beans instead.

One facility that we drive past on occasion, is set up to make 3 piles...this year they did not even get one full - it was probably only two-thirds full. They never even bothered to cover that pile and now it is nearly gone.

SUKUP must be giving away bins around here. Seem everybody has put up a couple in the last few years.

cgb @ jeff ind , has 1.3 million on the ground ...we would have everything done had it not been for the days and nites sittin on the side of the road waitin to get unloaded ,,. have heard horror stories of the line backed up miles to I-65 ...brother and I have 40 acres, yet ,, brother has about a hundred yet beyond that...storage has been a problem with 17+ moisture still rite out of the field ... and a wonderful yield

I think there is a lot more local storage than there used to be, and more corn is being used up for ethanol and not shipped down the river.

Chris
Just north of Decatur IL, there is a large outside pile. Earlier this fall, i seen a high hoe, moving corn to another high hoe that was on top of that pile. Next time i get by there, i'll get a picture.

Lots of corn left to harvest in my area. Local feed mill/grain dryer/storage facility built another big bin this year...and it's sitting empty, because they cant get propane to dry the corn.

The piles we used to see maybe a thing of the past for several reasons.

1) There is a higher usage rate locally. Not as much of the corn has to be shipped around the world to where it is used.

2) Additional storage has been built. On farms and grain facilities, they both have more bins/buildings to store corn. When corn was $2/bu. you could not afford to pay as much for storage. Spoilage was not as big of cost. Then you plug in $6-7 corn and then the spoilage gets to be a high enough cost that you can pencil out storage. Also the trend to larger farmers that usually have on farm storage in cutting down on piles.

I just counted up the bins, I know of, that have been built in the last two years. I came up with over 10 million bushels of storage. That is just around me not counting Coops and etc.

There is a corn crop out here. It just is not stored on the ground. So don't get your hopes up for high corn prices in the near term.

The guys around here are gearing up for BIG corn acres. That is the only way they can get close to paying the high rents they have bid up. Some ground was just rented this fall for $500/acre again. This is a new contract for two years. I can't figure it out with $4 corn. The per acre gross will be closer to $700 than the $1000 they are used to.

The Corn states of Iowa,IL,and NE will have large corn crops planted so the rest of the country can switch a lot of acres to to other crops and the corn price will not raise much.

An old Econ professor told me this one time: "I have never seen anything that a farmer could not produce into worthlessness". He is quite correct in this. Study the history of farm production in the last 100 years and you can see it. There is a short term "high" price of some crop. Every farmer and his brother think they can produce a HUGH crop and everyone else will not. So you get boom and bust cycles.

You can't trust the elevators to be in business next year. If they go belly up you loose your corn crop.That's why a lot of bins get built.

around here a lot of bins get put up so we dont need to wait in line at the elev. dont have time to waste when you have 3 or 4 thousand acers to get out

JD your quote reminds me of a bit of wisdom dad said once. He said "farmers are their own worst enemies". So true. Jim

My Dad's was "The problem is they buy at retail price & sell wholesale price.".

When buying its how much do you want for it & when selling how much would you give me for it.

I think if I was farming right now I would switch to a soybean/wheat rotation on everything

I read somewhere that there is between 12 or 13 billion bushels of on farm and commercial storage. Probably still see some piles; the the available storage can not be in the right place all of the time. Wasn't this years crop in the high 13 billion bushels?

Part of it is that we had used up the normal extra supply of corn that carries from one year to the next. There was very little reserve.

Locally our yield was off a little, too wet then way too dry, so no corn sitting around here.

Paul

Where is "Your area"?

lloyd,.....and they pay the freight both ways.