Martin Family Farms : January 2010

Still raining.....

As we begin the new year it does not appear that we have seen any change in the weather pattern. It still seems that we are getting measurable precipitation every week or so. Hopefully the rain they are receiving out west does not hit us, but it sounds like we could get some of it this weekend. Any hopes for winter tillage are disappearing quickly. The snow is almost all gone with a lot of the ponds full of water and creeks running at decent levels.

This week we have been to a couple of meetings trying to learn more about how we are going to handle 2010. One of the agronomists that we met with suggested adding 10-15 lbs of extra nitrogen due to the heavy rains we had last fall. He claims that all the rain last fall has depleted the amount of naturally occurring nitrogen in the soil. It would also give us some cheap insurance against running out of nitrogen if we have another wet spring and summer.

We also met with our marketing adviser to come up with a plan for selling the remainder of our old crop and how to handle our new crop sales going into the growing season. After talking with him it sounds like we will have a few opportunities to price corn at profitable levels, but we will probably be ready to sell larger percentages of the crop on those selling signals.

Jan 21, 2010 5:09:58 PM

What Happened???

Wow!! With the USDA report coming out last Tuesday a lot of people are saying "What Happened to the markets". We have seen a steep drop in prices that reflect the increase in acres and yield that USDA says is out there. Although those measurements were taken on December ,1 and there was a lot of corn harvested after that with several bushels still to be harvested. Hopefully, this will be a short term setback as we head into spring.

USDA January 12, 2010 Report

2009 Final Production

Jan 12 Avg Est December 2008

Corn 13.151 12.821 12.921 12.101

Soybeans 3.361 3.338 3.319 2.967

Yields

Jan 12 Avg Est December 2008

Corn 165.2 162.4 162.9 153.9

Soybeans 44.0 43.6 43.3 39.7

Ending Stocks

Jan 12 Avg Est December 2008/09

Corn 1.764 1.587 1.675 1.674

Soybeans 245 235 255 138

Wheat 976 914 900 657

December 1 Stocks

Jan 12 Avg Est 2008

Corn 10.934 10.722 10.078

Soybeans 2.337 2.415 2.276

Wheat 1.765 1.759 1.422

2010 Winter Wheat Acreage

Jan 12 Avg Est 2009

All Winter Wheat 37.097 40.916 43.311

Hard Red 27.8 30.414 31.649

Soft Red 5.9 6.975 8.309

Jan 17, 2010 9:44:14 PM

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Well 2010 is off to a pretty cold start. This has allowed us to catch up on all of our bookwork from 2009 and put the plans in place for the upcoming growing season. Our plans now are to try and raise as much corn as possible again in 2010. We are only planning on putting about 10% of our acres to soybeans which is only about a 5% increase from the 2009 plans. If mother nature decides not to cooperate again this year that will probably change because we do not have a lot of nitrogen applied or fieldwork done. We have also made plans to add extra equipment to help us to do the work in a short period of time if needed.

We have been making forward sales for the 2010 crop with cash grain levels over the $4.00 mark. Our fertilizer and chemical input costs are down 30%-50% compared to the record high levels of 2009. With the yields that we are producing now, corn over the $4.00 allows us to lock in some profits. We are still holding some old crop inventory into the early spring hoping for a rally.

We have also managed to get some deer hunting and ice fishing in this week. With the kids home from school it was an opportunity to get them out of the house for a while.