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Crop conditions can make pricing corn silage a challenge

A crop expert says varied corn quality and yields are making it difficult to put a price on corn silage.  Daniel Olson with Forage Innovations says thanks to the weather and moisture amounts, this year is different for many corn growers and silage buyers. “Some of that corn got rain soon enough to make significant cobs and the grain yields are going to look better than what the actual silage yields are.”

And Olson says that’s creating a challenge for pricing silage. “So the main issue is because some of those rains came late, we’re getting much higher amounts of bushels of corn per ton of corn silage, and so we have crop adjusters going out saying, hey, there’s 204-bushel corn here, and yet when we run it through the chopper and work through a multiplier of seven and a half or eight bushels, we’re at 140 bushels, so we have this big discrepancy.”

Olson has been working with clients to value silage based on the starch content of both grain and silage corn to get a more realistic price.