EVEN THE CORN?

One word “Inflation” and it’s only going to get worse. For those of us on fixed incomes it’s not a pleasant future.

Corn rises and falls by the year. Inflation plays a role to be sure, but it's a commodity and subject to the price swings that goes with it. I buy feed twice a month and have watched it rise and fall over the years.

If you're using 600lbs at a time you should price around for bulk deals. Someone out there may screen theirs well enough that you won't have to.

Fuel and fertilizer are up, that drives up the price of everything that grows.

Commodities are up double digits and the Federal Reserve will be adjusting interest for inflation. At work our steel and aluminum prices are almost changing hourly.

Cancelled our farm renters contract because of it....will re-negotiate a new one to factor in the increases in taxes and commodities. Farmers will be getting more for livestock and crops because of it, they're just passing along the extra input costs.....deer corn just got higher.

In the last 3 years I have seen 50# of corn go from $7.45 to $8.50 at the local farm supply. This year I planted iron/clay peas and intend to plant oats and rye for the winter food plots. Even with fertilizer the food plots will be cheaper than corn feeders plus the bears and hogs won't be quite as bad as they are when wrecking my feeders.

Down here we use cottonseed intermixed with corn. It’s better Futuna corn for a small part of the year and contributes to antler growth. Plus hogs don’t touch it.

Supposedly, if used long term it can render males sterile so we only use it for part of the year.

Just to say there are options…..in the South.

DeepSouth said:

Fuel and fertilizer are up, that drives up the price of everything that grows.

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It gets worse when the “grow” ends up as part of the fuel…..

Thank your .gov for the ethanol requirement in fuels. It would be great if the only harm it did was raise the price of corn.

jmorris said:

Thank your .gov for the ethanol requirement in fuels. It would be great if the only harm it did was raise the price of corn.

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Unlike artificially removing “food” from the supply chain while raising food prices, artificially raising fuel prices, and supplies a product that can damage what it fuels….

.gov ruining markets in new and innovative ways….

Much of the corn belt is experiencing moderate to severe drought this year. Buy your beef and pork NOW! Farmers are expecting to reduce inventory going forward as feed and forage will be expensive and in short supply.

Some of your price increase may be the new inflation, but I'm guessing most of it reflects a tight corn market and higher transport and processing costs.

Random 8 said:

Much of the corn belt is experiencing moderate to severe drought this year. Buy your beef and pork NOW!

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Funny we have had a mild summer and lots of rain. The only corn I have bought that wasn’t for me to eat was to entice pigs so I can trap and kill them.

Sometimes I get what I want but scavengers are healthy around our land.



We have to go out of our way to buy fuel for our gasoline tractors as you can only get ethanol free near the lakes around our farm. If you can keep the pigs out of the hay meadows, there is less need to run through tanks of fuel to smooth them out and it’s best to have them full of less hygroscopic fuel.

Corn was up to 12 $ a bag months ago, for us. The feed store manager mumbled something about trucking costs, so I DNK
if it had to do with the shortage of TT drivers, or what.

But YES, even the corn...

FL-NC said:

Inflation is out of control. 50 lb sacks of whole corn at tractor supply have been about $8 for as long as I remember. I was in there for something or other a couple days ago, and now they are $13 and change. I always like TS because the bags are easy to work with, and I know it takes 3 of them for each feeder (I have 4), so 12 bags/600 pounds to get started. Also, TS corn usually doesn't have lots of cob chunks in it to get stuck in the feeder motor. Looks like this year I will be getting barrels of corn filled at the feed store and improvising a strainer to get the cob out and sacking it up as I need to take it out. Glad I saved all the sacks from before.

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I mean this is probably a sample of the new future. Prices will come back down but I don’t think the price of anything will ever go back to where they were.

Nobody noticed the price of corn when every jerkwater town in the Midwest had its own pile of surplus corn laying under a giant tarp near the railroad tracks.
Farmers like me looked at ethanol plants as added value for our crop.
80+ percent of the feed value is still in the dried distillers grain after the processing of ethanol. It leaves the ethanol plant on semis and train cars bound for feed rations.
Global demand for protein is up especially in china. China is buying record amounts of corn and soybeans. Far more than normal. I'm not sure their strategy is good for the USA. You can bet it is good for China, just ask china Joe.
Farmers are enjoying good returns. Guess where some of our crop protection chemicals and fertilizer products come from? China . There were shortages of critical chemistry this year.
The industry is abuzz about what might happen next year.

Buy your corn in October and November when there's a glut of it....

330am ramblings...

Higher fuel cost + wage increases = higher prices

Armored farmer said:

Buy your corn in October and November when there's a glut of it....

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^^^This.

I think the biggest thing hitting corn is the fuel market. Dems are in control now and they typically buy more oil than we produce. Republicans tilt it back the other way so that we produce more than we buy. Supply and demand says that it costs more when we buy oil rather than produce it. That commodity by itself has so many small hits on agriculture that I’m surprised prices don’t fluctuate more. Fuel preps the fields. Fuel plants the fields. Fuel cares for the crops. Fuel harvests the crops. Fuel carries the crops to market. Fuel moves product from market to shelf, generally with a few stops in between. Fuel also moves all the other stuff associated with crops. Fuel is up locally by about 50% from this time last year. Your $8 bag of corn is only up slightly more than 50%. I wouldn’t call it a win, but I would be happy it’s not higher than that.

Asked my mom (89) about inflation the other day. She said things are ramping up even faster than they did under Carter.

Armored farmer said:

Nobody noticed the price of corn when every jerkwater town in the Midwest had its own pile of surplus corn laying under a giant tarp near the railroad tracks.
Farmers like me looked at ethanol plants as added value for our crop.
80+ percent of the feed value is still in the dried distillers grain after the processing of ethanol. It leaves the ethanol plant on semis and train cars bound for feed rations.
Global demand for protein is up especially in china. China is buying record amounts of corn and soybeans. Far more than normal. I'm not sure their strategy is good for the USA. You can bet it is good for China, just ask china Joe.
Farmers are enjoying good returns. Guess where some of our crop protection chemicals and fertilizer products come from? China . There were shortages of critical chemistry this year.
The industry is abuzz about what might happen next year.

Buy your corn in October and November when there's a glut of it....

330am ramblings...

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Straight from the farmers mouth. Man In the know.

I wonder how much corn is used across the USA for baiting deer, hogs, & ext....???

I'm sure it would blow us away with the number of tons sold for bait!!!
@Armored farmer and the other farmers in the group appreciate the purchases.

WestKentucky said:

I think the biggest thing hitting corn is the fuel market. Dems are in control now and they typically buy more oil than we produce. Republicans tilt it back the other way so that we produce more than we buy. Supply and demand says that it costs more when we buy oil rather than produce it.

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We export 4-5 times more Petroleum than we import. We now export more oil than Saudi Arabia. We produce more than enough to meet U.S. consumption, but there's more money in the foreign markets, so we need to import some to make up. IOWs, the imported oil is less than what we sell our domestic oil for. Want to blame someone for fuel prices, blame big corporations. Look at your 401K and see where a good protion of your earnings are coming from.Traffic on the interstate has never been so high, that's why the demand, and the price of gas has increased. Go to a National Park and see if you can find room to park. Go to any tourist destination in the country and see how much motel rooms have increased. It's us that are making those prices go up. Not the Dems or the Republicans.

As for corn prices, they have actually dropped about a buck a bushel in the last 2 months. What the OP is seeing is corn that is being used for recreational purposes. Anything recreational has increased greatly in price because of demand and what the market will bear. Stimulus monies made so the market will bear more and so prices have jumped.

It's only $8.99 for a 40lb sack at my local Tractor Supply. We usually do a 50/50 mix of corn with protein. The local tractor supply has started carrying 40 lbs bags of 50/50 mixed for 10.99 when you factor in that a 40 lb sack of deer protein is $14-$16 its a pretty good deal.

Living here in the middle of corn country, it always blows my mind the the world is able to consume so much corn. We live in a sea of it.
On behalf of the producers, a big thank you to everyone who buys it.
Just a couple of quick points:
Field corn is not like sweet corn that you get at the grocery. You might be surprised how many people think that it is.
Ethanol production DOES NOT ruin the feed value of corn. It is nearly all still in the DDG.
You can thank the EPA for ethanol usage since they mandated an oxygenate be blended with gasoline. farmers capitalized on this with ethanol. Prior to ethanol, big oil companies were supplying the industry with MTBE. An oil based product. It is poisonous. You can drink ethanol.
I'm stopping here before I get too much further over my head.
I own shares of LINCOLNLAND AGRI ENERGY in Palestine, Illinois. We produce ethanol, DDG, corn oil, and capture CO2.
. Some of our production goes there. Some goes to the poultry and pork producers in the S.E. via the Indiana RR. Sometimes I haul the 150miles to the Ohio River. That gets barged to New Orleans for export.

I would be happy to know that there was some of my corn in a feeder on a hunting lease. what you see from our back patio continues for over a mile of corn.

I usually take a bag of rice bran and 2 bags of corn each weekend to deer camp.
Looks like I'll be budgeting aroung $30-$32 per weekend just on feed this season.
That's definitely more than usual.
Looks like it'll be Busch Light this year instead of the good stuff.