News

Better be thinking about storage

With the potential for another record corn crop, Purdue University agricultural economist Chris Hurt says farmers better start thinking about grain storage.

“With this huge crop of corn across the Midwest, I think it says you gotta be recalculating storage needs,” said Hurt. “I think it is probably going to make the returns for storage even stronger, particularly for corn and the bottom line is, it looks like going to be strong financial incentives to store the crop.”

Something else to consider, the Purdue ag economist says if these wheat prices hold, farmers in the Midwest should be looking at wheat.

“Wheat prices are strongly encouraging wheat production,” Hurt said. “Now as a marketing person if you’re gonna plant more wheat, you might also want to do a little forward contracting, because that wheat acreage probably is going to respond enormously, the Eastern Corn Belt had the lowest acreage of winter wheat ever recorded in 150 years of recorded data, and now, we could just go the other way, the incentive to plant wheat is very strong.”

But Chris Hurt says wheat acres could be limited somewhat by the amount of available seed wheat.

AUDIO: Chris Hurt, Purdue ag economist (2:00 MP3)