Corn Field Fires
- Thread starter HawkGold
- Start date
okeefe4prez
Well-Known Member
Is the corn still in the fields? Without Iowa football showing me a weekly update of the harvest schedule I have no idea what the hell is going on. Are we all going to fucking starve?
HawkGold
Well-Known Member
HawkGold
Well-Known Member
Iowa is ahead of IL on harvest which in part why the derecho was so much worse but the CR winds were insane. Central IL had more damage than thought
Fryowa
Administrator
Nope. Supply issues are null for at least as long as you are alive. $3 corn is here to stay.
HawkGold
Well-Known Member
Take away trumps farm socialism and half the farm operations are gone. We produce way to much.
Haha, I know or think you are joking about starving but it is funny how many people think Iowa farmers actually grow corn for people to eat as corn during dinner etc.
Fryowa
Administrator
Farm subsidies from the government go back many, many presidents from both parties.
There's no such thing as producing too much. Cut production and you have idle capacity which is bad for the input and output side. It's just going to drive prices up (artificially) due to inefficiencies.
Falling prices due to supply (which is altogether different than cutting production) is proper, because when corn hits $1.75 or some other arbitrary amount, growers will leave the market, sell their capacity to more efficient producers, and then they (and their descendants) will go get jobs at gas stations or banks or schools or manufacturing companies which balances out. It's happened before and makes for good sob stories on TV, and affects elections, but happens nonetheless.
And prices aren't some mythical oracle that people can't figure out. That's just ag credit union watercooler talk for people who either can't be bothered to think beyond the morning CBOT volume or are just plain unintelligent.
Science is why corn and beans have stalled out at $3 and $8 for years and is why it's going to stay that way (obviously plus any general inflation/deflation). The mythical reading of the grain price tea leaves is a thing of the past because modern seed genetics has evolved into a bulletproof product. In NW Iowa we have 5 counties classified by NOAA as being in exceptional drought which, for the non ag people, is the highest level of drought condition...and we're still producing near record yields. And those records get smashed every year, usually regardless of weather. Even ten years ago this drought would've pushed corn to $6-7 just on psychology alone. You know why the derecho didn't do anything to prices? Because it didn't have any effect on supply. The rest of the national crop is way too hardy to be affected by a little blip like that. The vast majority of those plants are still harvestable because yields are so dense now, and the plants are more robust. Hail doesn't take out fields like it used to because of stalk and ear hardiness, wind doesn't knock it over anymore, and in the case of flooding, every major seed company has 65 day corn that will still do 200 bushels in Iowa soil. All of those traits are bred into seed and there's no slowing that science down. There's too much money being made.
You want grain price guesses? There you go. It ain't changing anytime soon and it sure as hell isn't going up.
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okeefe4prez
Well-Known Member
I only eat Oscar Mayer processed meats and items that have high fructose corn syrup as the first ingredient, so I get a little bit sensitive about the corn crop.
okeefe4prez
Well-Known Member
The only thing that will drive prices up materially is a massive inflationary wave coupled with absurdly high oil prices and rampant commodities speculation like we saw about 10 years ago. The nerds from ISU and Illinois have cracked the code on that shit and eliminated production downside risk for just about every potential risk short of flooding that exceeds 1993 levels. My buddy's dad was senior brass at Pioneer back in the day and they had a dream of turning huge swaths of Africa into corn fields. There is some good soil and extremely good weather conditions near the southern parts of Africa and if they get the geopolitical side figured out and can reliably grow there, it'll put even more downward pressure on prices.
Fryowa
Administrator
Nostalgic throwback concept.
1) Farm operations will never be gone, period. They will be absorbed into larger operations, but that ground will never sit idle.
2) The concept of losing the family farm and the evil of large farms is a total bs idea. It's pillow talk for ag lenders and grain elevator managers.
People bitch about losing the "family farm" to the evil 15-20,000 acre corporate farms.
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Go back 150 years. This nation was blanketed in people who actually were family farmers planting ten acres of land and selling their grain to local people who milled it locally and sold that food locally. But as implements came along, all of a sudden a few rich farmers had 25 acres of ground because they could get it harvested in time now.
Then the internal combustion engine came along and now there were some rich folks who had the machines first, and outcompeted the 25 acre guys and bought up their "family farms." Then they had 75 acres of ground, a couple farm hands, and were the new evil empire ruining the common farmer.
Fast forward through about twenty iterations of that and now the average "family farm" guy is on 1,000 acres with two combines, two 1,000 bushel grain carts, and 3 semis, bitching and moaning and complaining that their "family farms" are being put out of business by that one rich guy in the county who can buy everyone's ground with cash instead of getting a loan.
It's bull--------shit. All of it. The people whining now were the evil landowners of the previous generation and so on and so on and so on all the way back to the first Iowa homesteads.
And let's not even start with the people who pretend that America's farmers are basically cooking our suppers and putting the food in our mouths for us out of the goodness of their hearts and the sweat of their brows. It's an industry. An industry that cannot function even one bit without accountants, bankers, fuel producers, veterinarians, equipment manufacturers, lawyers, seed companies, doctors, internet providers, transportation, CHINA, cattle farmers, and ethanol plants. Take any one of those out of the equation and the house falls down. This ain't Ma and Pa out there handpicking corn and grass-feeding ten cows so you and I can survive the winter.
Grain farmers aren't putting a damn thing on our tables. Hell, the vast, overwhelming majority of every year's crop goes to ethanol, Mexico, Japan, and cattle feed. Cattle feed us though, you say? Yep they do. After those cattle have passed through the millions of workers' hands in hundreds of industries who produce, sell, and transport them to the meat case or Stouffer's frozen lasagna. Not a single kernel of field corn goes "on your table," folks.
I'm sure glad there aren't "family car manufacturers," or "family hospitals," because of obvious cost, quality, and safety issues. I don't know why everyone loses their damn minds about corporate farming.
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Fryowa
Administrator
And oil will never go bonkers again because we've got more supply in North Dakota than we'll ever need.
The production is shut down now, but people need to realize that isn't a bad thing. We spent the money, time, and manpower to build the infrastructure, but it's very, very easy to shut it down and restart as needed. There are 8.7 bbls recoverable in the Bakken fields with current equipment already in place, and the USGS estimates 24 billion bbls total. That's not including any of the Oklahoma/Texas stuff.
Saudi's wanna make oil cheap and make it not cost effective to run our tar sands in ND? Fine by us. We'll just stop producing it and get prices back in line. Saudi's wanna make everyone's lives miserable by contracting supply? Go ahead. We already have the extracting infrastructure in place and plenty of people to get it up and back running again lickety split.
True oil independence (actual production, not just theoretical capacity) is the best thing that's happened to this country economically since WW2. OPEC is toast and the only countries they can hurt now are themselves.
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Fryowa
Administrator
I work in an industry and for a company tied very closely to agriculture, in particular grain crops. If one of my higher ups walked in my office and pop quizzed me on current grain prices and I was wrong I'd probably get subtly obsoleted.
Talking to several producers in my area, this drought is actually making them money. These modern hybrids are so drought resistant that they still have yields good enough that they don't see much, if any difference. They're saving tons of cash because everything coming out of the field is dry enough they don't need to buy fuel to run dryers on their bins, and if they take it straight to the elevator they aren't getting dinged for moisture.
And the kicker is that even though prices are low, prices are stable. With stable prices you can plan. When you can plan you're efficient, and when you're efficient you make money.
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Fryowa
Administrator
I got my picture taken by the Wienermobile when I was a kid and I'll be damned if I know where it is.
smhawk
Well-Known Member
Can we at least admit the execution of trying to get a better trade deal with China was terrible? What did the billions of dollars of relief to farmers buy us as it relates better trade deals? Combined the relief packages were 27 billion dollars to farmers.
Our national trade deficit might have slightly improved with china but globally is nearly identical to what it was before all the tariffs.
Fryowa
Administrator
I don't think it was great, but I'm not an impartial observer since I'm not in favor of farm subsidies. I'm a free market guy, and like any other industry I feel that it should be the strongest swimmers who survive.
We don't give money to accountants or sales people who lose their businesses due to bad luck or incompetence, we should not do that with anyone else. For many years the justification for farm welfare (the farm bill is communism in it's purest form) was that farmers feed us and are therefore more important that any other profession, but that's no longer true anymore. Their industry is completely reliant on hundreds of other industries.
There is X amount of tillable ground in the US, and there is X amount of perfect yield of product according to the level of technology at any given time (capacity). Whether that's farmed by 100,000 small farmers or 1,000 huge farms is immaterial, and one could argue that larger farms are more efficient, productive, and keep prices more stable.
I always chuckle when people say I should support the Farm Bill because my job benefits from agriculture. That ground is getting planted and harvested whether Ma and Pa Kettle farm it, or Kettle Incorporated does it. Either of the two still need goods and services to help farm that land.
HawkGold
Well-Known Member
Actually pretty good analysis. The subsidies are saving farmers. About half of farmers are expendable based on efficiency of production. We have too many farmers based on demand. The subsidies do cause production numbers to be higher.
Prices may be going up based on the 2020 economic reset like 2008, and about 1970. But relatively speaking based on currency valuation they are going anywhere except blips in production.
In the end fundamentals win out over technicals.
HawkGold
Well-Known Member
A lot of the beans still ended up in China. What we don't admit is that Brazil produces a better bean.
okeefe4prez
Well-Known Member
No, it's crony capitalism in its purest form. Communism in its purest form reallocates land ownership to the collective and starves a nation when productivity plummets. Have you read the history of China under Mao or Soviet Russia under Stalin? Fucking disasters, bruh. Absolute, unmitigated disasters. American politicians of all stripes have learned a cardinal rule - take whatever action is necessary to ensure a bumper crop.
