Corn is the most widely grown crop in Marinette and Oconto counties, being planted annually on approximately 110,000 acres.
The 2013 acreage will probably be down a bit, as many parts of Oconto County had planting difficulties, creating a need for crop switches or prevented planting acres. We’ll think of our corn crop from the grain equivalent right now, even though about 40 percent of our corn acres gets chopped for corn silage to feed cattle.
Yield of corn combined for grain in the two counties varies widely from year to year due to the effects of weather, but a good working average is about 145 bushels per acre. That equates to just a hair under 16 million bushels of grain getting harvested. If you’re curious, remember that a bushel is 8 gallons volumetrically, making this amount of grain enough to fill about 195 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Now, let’s talk dollars and cents. As I write this, the current price of corn is $4.79 (Chicago price, not local—it’s too complicated to talk about local pricing factors here). So, theoretically, right now our corn crop is worth around $77 million. If the price of corn drops by 10 cents, the value of our area corn crop decreases by $1.6 million, which will obviously impact farm profitability quite a bit.
In reality, corn price can fluctuate widely. In December, the Chicago corn price was $6.42 and has steadily declined in value since then, but with price spikes of near $5.75 in late March and very early June. Since December, our corn crop (on paper, at least) has decreased in value by $26.1 million! Just think about how much that could have meant to the local economy.
There are ways that farms can lock in grain, milk or other commodity prices to attempt to achieve better or more consistent prices. However, there is risk involved in using those techniques, as well, so farms have to weigh the risk of using them versus the risk of the price dropping if they do not use them.
Farms that have not yet implemented grain marketing plans can contact University of Wisconsin-Extension staff, marketing agencies, or watch for the Winning The Game grain marketing workshops that will be held in our area in upcoming months.
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