Many Iowa corn growers will be drying and storing a majority of their harvest this year, with low grain prices and a late-maturing, possible-record crop. Iowa State University farm financial specialist Steven Johnson says farmers have built a tremendous amount of on-farm storage in the last few years and will likely tuck away as much of the crop as they can.
“We’re expecting across most of the southern two-thirds of Iowa bottlenecks with drying corn and then where are we going to put this last 15 to 30-percent of the corn crop?” Johnson says. “Farmers didn’t do as good a job of marketing this crop and the majority of these bushels are unpriced.”
Johnson says elevators may have to take ownership of the remaining crops to enable them to dry and store it. That will require farmers to look at prices later or minimum price contracts. He says ISU has online calculators to determine the best marketing strategy.
Johnson says, “It allows you to go through, step by step, looking at comparing selling wet corn with a moisture discount to drying commercially and selling that corn later to drying on-farm and selling that corn later.” The spreadsheets help determine the net revenue after drying and storage under various scenarios. They can be downloaded free off the ISU Extension website.
(Reporting by Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton)