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Better than expected yields provide bright spot for farmers
Better than expected yields have been a bright spot for farmers after a challenging year.
Northwestern Indiana Farmer Kendell Culp wrapped up harvest around Thanksgiving.
“Our yields were not as good as last year, but they were better than we anticipated,” he says. “We’re all anxious to put 2019 behind us for a variety of reasons, but as we go forward I think we’re going to look back at 2019 and say with everything we endured we came out better than we thought we would and we’re looking forward to a positive 2020.”
He tells Brownfield a lesson learned from this year was the importance of cover crops.
“For the permeability of the soil, for keeping nitrogen in your soil, for water intake and usage within the soil so hopefully you can get on your ground earlier in the spring if you have cover crops,” he says. “Those are some lessons learned, I think. In a negative weather year, it is good to look for some of the positives and those are some of the positives we found.”
Culp spoke to Brownfield at the 2019 Ag Policy Forum by the Indiana Corn Growers Association and Indiana Soybean Alliance.
Audio: Kendell Culp, Indiana farmer
Why do all these comments continually start with better than anticipated? Were they anticipating a total crop failure? an average crop? Solid numbers would help everybody in the production agriculture sector get a feeling of what’s really going on out here. This seems like it’s controlled by the C.M.E., Handpicked people to project a certain feel in the market. My crop for corn was 30 bushel below my aph, and my soybeans were 15 bushels below. Those are solid factual numbers not anticipated or feel good numbers but factual, so I’d be happy to have a reporter come out and we can sit down and talk about real numbers not just feelings on how the market is or how my crop was.