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Bounty in Minnesota's fields
A warm September is expected to propel soybean farmers to a record crop, and corn predictions are not far behind 2007 records.
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A government forecast issued Friday said soybean crops had largely survived the cool summer of 2009, predicting a record crop. A farmer harvesting his fields in southern Minnesota on Friday only saw snow in the forecast -- and worried.
"There's a lot of soybeans out there yet," said Gene Hugoson, the state's commissioner of agriculture. He spoke to a reporter by cell phone from the cab of his John Deere tractor on Friday afternoon, racing to get his harvest in before nightfall.
Whether scurrying to get crops out of the fields this fall or waiting out the floods of last spring, farmers this year dealt with a host of weather troubles that led some to lower their expectations. It turns out things mostly worked out OK, according to the crop forecast.
Soybean farms nationwide should harvest a record 3.25 billion bushels, up 10 percent from last year. (Farmers expect to harvest 76.6 million acres of soybeans this year, the most ever.) The nation's corn crop, meanwhile, will come to 13 billion bushels, up 8 percent from last year and just 0.2 percent shy of the 2007 record.
Minnesota farmers will harvest 1.2 billion bushels of corn on 7.1 million acres of land, the forecast predicted. Soybeans, meanwhile, should total 284 million bushels on the same amount of land. Corn and soybeans are the nation's two largest crops, worth $47.4 billion and $27.4 billion last year, according to government records.
A warmer than average September in Minnesota allowed soybean fields to catch up after a slow start, and corn got enough rain during crucial periods of growth, said Seth Naeve, an agronomist at the University of Minnesota.
"You hear people say 'August makes beans,' or 'September makes beans.' I think this year shows that September was really important for yields," he said.
Even though the season got off to a rough start, and dry conditions plagued some areas of the state, warmer days last month helped soybean plants fill out during their final weeks of growth, he said. Some farmers, expecting to harvest merely the national average for soybeans of 40 bushels per acre, are finding that crops did better, he said.
"People are harvesting 50 [bushels per acre], and they're overjoyed," he said.
Not everyone's out of the clear yet. The snow could delay farmers who don't yet have their soybeans out, said Hugoson.
"The trouble now is the days are getting shorter, and the fields can't dry out," he said. A spell of dry, breezy weather would help, he added.
An improved forecast
The government forecast Friday from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) was an improvement on last month's forecast, which had predicted 5 million fewer bushels of soybeans nationally. Friday's forecast also bumped up the average Minnesota corn yield by three bushels to 170 per acre. The snowfall expected to hit the state today won't leave lasting damage, said Doug Hartwig, of the NASS field office in St. Paul.
"It's not unusual to see snow in October, but it doesn't stay around," he said.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report. Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329
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