We are now in the front end of the grind of harvest.
Though much-needed rain fell on Tuesday, we didn’t get the day off. We didn’t get all the repair work done, but still called it a day at 4 p.m. after finishing a tough repair on the undercarriage of the tracked grain cart.
We continue to ship corn as fast as we can. Bids at the nearest ethanol plant continue to be strong and lines are short. I don’t think we’ve been able to get in and out this quickly since the 90s. A local elevator got into the mix this week with a quick ship bid as well. They have a train coming next week that needs to be filled and headed to the southeast.
Marketing strategically
We are at double what we usually ship during harvest time. I’m simply looking at the numbers.
- Basis is better than any posted bid for the next two months.
- We’ve done a combination of cash, futures contracts we had in place, and marketing program bushels to make these sales.
- We also left some bushels on basis.
- I’m also looking at the value of interest. The value of interest for a month on corn is about 2.5 cents.
Slow start to wheat planting
I finally got around to planting some wheat this week. The decision of where and how much we are going to plant was complicated by the hog manure opportunity taking acres where I planned to grow wheat. We’re still working through it, but we figured out the first piece of the puzzle figured.
It took a little while to get the planter loaded and ready to go. When equipment sits things seem to stop working and/or the operator (me in this case) forgets how to make everything run correctly. And the planter was put away after double-crop soybeans without remembering to fix a couple things. Already running ragged, I got frustrated quickly and decided to arrange a service call.
Moving to relay cropping
The 15” wheat worked well last year. Yields were comparable to traditional row spacing and it was really easy to plant beans between the rows.
I haven’t quite figured out how yet, but I plan to experiment with “relay cropping” next year. I will plant the soybeans into the growing wheat crop so they will have a head start (versus double crop) when the wheat is harvested.