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MO Bootheel farmers plan to store grain until river levels rise

A farmer in the Missouri Bootheel says the low Mississippi River levels have thrown a wrench in the marketing plans of many farmers at harvest.

Mike Martin from Bernie says elevators are starting to turn away loads of grain if farmers haven’t forward contracted, at least until river levels come back up.

“They’re not able to put as much in the barge as it normally holds so when they load half the barge and send it down the river it means they’re paying half the freight, which isn’t a good thing.”

Martin says some farmers don’t have any choice but to store grain and wait for river levels to improve.

“There’s a lot of grain bins that have been built over the years that farmers have been able to use this year that in other years they just don’t.”

Martin says some planned as best as they could to avoid these market challenges, but no one expected levels to get this low. He says his farm has plenty of grain storage and an early harvest helped make crop marketing easier.