Harvest brings out concerned farmers

Brian D. Bridgeford / Capital Newspapers

By Brian D. Bridgeford, Capital Newspapers

With weather swinging between flood and draught, crop prices peaking, then dropping by half, and credit uncertainties, Sauk County farmers face some troubling concerns as the harvest season comes to an end.

On a recent Sunday evening, a setting sun gave the combine driven by town of Sumpter farmer James Ind a golden halo as he finished off a row of corn across Highway 12 from the Badger Army Ammunition Plant. Ind said he had another 40 acres to finish harvesting nearby, but didn't think he would get the job done that evening. Around him the thick blanket of corn stubble and rustling rows of golden corn plants still awaiting his combine gave testimony to the productivity of the land.

Ind said he faced too much rain and flooding early in the growing season, followed by drought later in the summer. It left him expecting his yields would be lower this year.

"We had a lot of rain (early) that washed out a lot," he said. "We had too much water, then we didn't have enough water."

Rural North Freedom farmer Tim Trower said he harvested his acres of soybeans in October and got an "OK" yield of about 35 bushels per acre. The lack of rain in August meant inadequate moisture for his crop just when the plants were making beans.

"There was a drought there when the pods were filling," he said. "It affected them a little more than I thought they would.

"Could be better, could have been worse," Trower said.

Prices for farming inputs like fuel, seed and fertilizer were high at the beginning of the planting season, he said. Farmers are getting some advantage now because fuel prices having been dropping. However, with an eye on planting next spring, Trower said it doesn't look good for farmers on the business side.

"The seed and the fertilizer costs are very high," he said. "Also the chemical costs are going up."

Prices for corn and other crops peaked very high during the summer, he said then dropped faster than the costs of the things farmers need to operate.

"As the (crop) prices go down, the input prices are not going to go down," he said.

Ind said the local United Co-op's staff estimate farmers need corn prices at about $5 a bushel to cover their costs this year, but market prices had already fallen below that by the time he was harvesting his land.

"It's uncertain," he said, "nobody knows what they will get for their corn.

"This summer it was $7 (a bushel) corn, now its $3 something," Ind said.

Some farmers will do very well because they contracted to sell their corn or other crops while the prices were high, said Denise Brusveen, University of Wisconsin Extension agriculture agent for Sauk County. Others waited in the hope the price for their product would rise higher still and are now disadvantaged because the price has fallen so far.

"The prices are still higher than what they had been in the past, the problem is fertilizer prices have gone way, way up and they have not come back down along with the grain prices coming back down," she said. "Some of these guys put fertilizer on two or even three times this year because it kept getting washed away by the rain."

In a market where prices for their crop may swing far and wide, farmers may have to learn to figure out at what price for their grain they'll get a "comfortable profit," she said. Then they can try to lock that in rather than waiting for the highest possible price for their harvest.

Ron Statz of the National Farmers Organization office in Sauk City agreed with Brusveen, high costs for inputs combined with dropping crop prices are going to be hard on farmers in Sauk County and around the nation. The falling price for the crop will hurt farmers more than any shortfall on yields due to nature's caprice, he said.

"The price of their product has dropped almost in half over the past couple months," said Statz. "Input costs will not allow them to make money at $3.25 to $3.50 grain. They will lose money on corn at that level."

Two years ago, nobody would expect farmers to be losing money with corn at $3.50 a bushel, Statz said. In 2008, prices for the things they need to operate have risen enough that price is too low.

While the credit crunch being experience by other industries is not as severe for agriculture, banks and other lenders are still making it more difficult and costly for farmers to borrow than in the past, Statz said. And farmers must borrow routinely each year to buy the seed and inputs to begin planting or to purchase livestock they will raise to market weight.

"It is interesting to the economy, how many farmers will be able to get crop loans to put in next year's crop," he said. "Financial institutions have backed off on their credit policies.

"It will be interesting to see how many farmers in Sauk County are affected by tighter credit requirements," Statz said.

Statz said the agricultural economy is one place national policy makers should look as they try to stimulate the current depressed United States economy and get people and industries back to productivity. Farmers need credit to put in crops and buy animals to raise, he said.

"It's one of the few places you can create wealth, by growing crops and feeding cattle and producing milk," he said. "Wealth, once it is created on the farm, multiplies through the economy anywhere from seven to 11 times, depending on whose numbers you want to look at."

State and federal agencies which track crop yields have not completed their harvest tally for this season, so county-wide numbers for crop productivity will not be available for several weeks, said Curtis Norgard, executive director of the federal Farm Service Agency office in Baraboo.