Harvests ‘not what we were hoping for'

LIMA - At the beginning of the season, farm leaders predicted a banner year for corn and bean crops. What a difference a few months makes.

Farmers around the region pulled off most of their soybeans and are preparing for what will no doubt be a trying corn harvest. Not only are they not expecting record crops, some are happy to have crops at all.

"It's not exactly what we were hoping for. There's been just a series of problems from spring on," said Curtis Young, Allen County's Ohio State University Extension agent.

The season started with a too-wet spring that kept some farmers out of the fields and forced others to replant. That was followed by a dry summer that left crops wilting. Then came September and a wind storm that leveled acres of corn. The result is corn with scattered maturity levels and fields with acres of flat stalks that add hours to harvest time.

"That's probably the most unsavory thing that happened recently, the wind storm," Young said. "With that, there were a multitude of acres that were flattened, and that causes serious complications with the harvesting process."

With a typical corn crop, farmers can harvest a field at 3 to 6 mph. With the leveled stalks, that drops to about 1 mph. That means more time, more fuel and, in some cases, special equipment.

"That means an expenditure of a great deal of time and a lot more fuel than they would have harvesting otherwise. That's not what they need right now," Young said.

Statewide, the corn yield is forecast at 147 bushels per acre, down five bushels from September's forecast, according to the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Corn growers expect to harvest 3.15 million acres in 2008, compared to 3.61 million acres harvested last year. Nationwide, the crop is expected to be 7 percent below last year.

Soybean growers are expected to do a little better statewide. With close to 85 percent of the crop in, ODA officials are forecasting a state average of 38 acres per bushel, nine bushels below the 2007 average. The local numbers are about the same.

"We're getting reports of soybeans as low as 20 bushels per acre and probably the highest is the mid-40s or maybe 50. We're going to average about 30 to 35 bushels per acres,' Young said.

The weak harvest isn't the end of the bad news for farmers. What farmers get for their corn may be down as well. Prices shot up early in the year but started to decline in recent weeks.

"They're not near what they were last fall," said John Smith, the Ohio State University Extension agent for Auglaize County. "The price of oil dropped, which means the ethanol prices are down. Then you have the fact that the USDA was vying for a bin-buster harvest. I have no idea where they came up with that."

On the bright side, the lower fuel costs should give farmers a break on input costs. But that's little consolation after a year like this, Smith said.

"It's slow going on corn harvest, and I'm sure they're going to be losing up to 15 percent. Production is down, and input costs went up dramatically this spring. It's really not what we were hoping for," Smith said.