Record Corn Silage Could Cut 4-5 Million Acres
Aug 16, 2012
Corn bulls may soon start talking about how much more "silage" is going to be cut this year compared to last. We are hearing producers all over the country taking about cutting more for silage than they had anticipated just a few weeks back. One e-mail recently floating around stated, "Decided to silage the corn and cut water expense. $75/ton making 26 tons." The point in this is $75 x 26 = $1950 by 225 is over $8.50 a bushel. To say the least, these numbers may be very conservative. I have heard of several producers reporting unharvested wheat straw priced in the field around $65 per ton of dry matter (DM) and good corn silage pricing in around $160 per ton of DM. Some field estimates now place the dollar value of drought-stressed corn silage in the Midwest between $90 to $150 per ton of dry matter. If you want to read more about corn silage check out the article, "What Value Will Corn Silage Have" written by Peggy Coffeen, dairy and livestock editor at Agri-View. Or if you would like to find out how much silage you can expect to get out of your field check out this link: "Buying and Selling Corn Silage." The point of all this is that corn producers might end up cutting more fields for silage than any of us have anticipated. Now I want to tie this together with today’s news out of the FSA. If you hadn’t yet heard, the FSA just shook things up saying certified acreage data for 2012 actually indicates planted acres for this crop year is likely some 3 million acres "HIGHER" than what the NASS had last estimated. They are talking we could see an extra 1.2 million soybean acres planted and an extra 500,000 - 1 million acres of corn planted. I just want to reiterate that this number has not taken into account the dismal growing season, nor the acres of corn we could lose to silage. I am hearing talk out of analysts that say if there’s record silage cut, this could jeopardize another 4 - 5 million harvested corn acres. As I said, corn cut for silage could turn out to be a wild card and could have the folks over at the FSA and the USDA reducing their final harvested acres numbers as we move through harvest.
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