(USA Today) – Corn seed salespeople say that although farmers are more wary of the impact of a second year of drought, seed sales have held up well.
“Farmers traditionally have under-planted for their corn populations,” said Jeremy Groeteke, agronomy research manager for DuPont Pioneer. He repeated the old cornfield adage: “If you plant for a smaller crop, that’s what you’ll get.”
Seed companies Pioneer and rival Monsanto Co., as well as smaller independents, have urged farmers, with some success, to push their plant population upward from the 20,000 to 25,000 plants per acre that was standard a quarter-century ago to more than 30,000 since 2010.
Because corn plants have just one ear per plant, higher populations are the key to greater corn yields. More production is needed to fulfill growing demand for corn from ethanol producers, livestock producers and other nations. Corn prices have averaged $7 per bushel in the past 12 months, pushing up prices for meat in the supermarket.
Since hitting a record yield of 182 bushels per acre in 2009, however, Iowa’s corn farmers have seen their yields dip to 164 bushels per acre in 2010, 171 bushels in 2011 and a 15-year low of 140 bushels per acre last year as the worst drought in a half-century struck the state.
The 2010 crop was marred by record rains in July, which drowned about 10 percent of Iowa’s corn crop. Two years later, the drought pared 30 bushels per acre from the previous year’s yield.
The weather factor might be present again this year. Last week’s storm put as much as 10 inches of snow on much of Iowa, adding about an inch or so of moisture to the soil, when the soil thaws sometime in March.
That will help. But the latest U.S. Drought Monitor showed through Tuesday that 90 percent of Iowa’s topsoil and subsoils were moisture-deficient.
“We’ve heard some talk by farmers that they might cut back, but it’s not turning out to be a big problem. The farmers appear to be optimistic,” said Myron Stine, marketing manager for Adel, Iowa-based Stine Seed Co.
As the selling season began last fall, seed companies worried that drought would make farmers cut back on planting. Monsanto Chairman Hugh Grant noted that Brazilian farmers, burned by a drought a year ago, softened their purchases for the first of their two Southern Hemisphere planting seasons this year.
“But the second season has come on better,” Grant said. “That, plus a strong order book this fall and winter in the U.S. Corn Belt, enables us to predict a strong sales season this year.”
A big reason that seed companies can be optimistic about sales is the expectation, despite the prospect of continued drought, of a record number of acres to be planted for corn this spring.
Agriculture experts exhaled last year at reports of 96 million to 97 million acres planted for corn, the highest total since 1937. That number was almost 25 million more than the 73 million acres planted for corn in 1993 in the pre-ethanol era.
This year, early private forecasts for the corn crop have indicated as many as 99 million acres will be planted. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is surveying farmers’ planting intentions, and its report in late March will set the mood for the corn markets for weeks thereafter.
While corn prices now are about half of soybean prices, a typical cornfield will yield three to four times per bushel more than the soybean yield, thus returning greater profit to farmers.
Pioneer has begun an aggressive marketing push for its Aquamax drought-resistant corn, which it says will bring farmers as much as 7 percent to 8 percent more yield in drought conditions than typical hybrids. The 2012 drought has generated an obvious surge of interest in Aquamax, beyond western Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
“Aquamax was originally intended for the western fringe of the Corn Belt, but we’re seeing interest well into the central part of the Corn Belt,” said Pioneer’s Groeteke.
Pioneer has been able to get Aquamax to market somewhat faster than rival Monsanto’s DroughtGard drought-tolerant corn. The Monsanto product is genetically modified and thus had to go through federal regulatory approval, but Pioneer’s Aquamax consists of germplasm that comes from conventional hybrid breeding.
