Friday, November 15, 2013

End of season harvest report.....at least from my point of view

I just finished writing a harvest piece for the Sidney Herald and thought I would share it. 



Another crop production year has come and gone and I can say with some amount of certainty that, in the 4 crop production cycles that I have witnessed, no 2 of them have been alike.  This year was highlighted by early spring rains that delayed planting in some areas quite a bit but allowed for enough moisture to get the crop off to a good start.  This was followed by some significant amounts of moisture that ultimately lead to disease pressure in many of our fields.  Then, just as we thought we were sailing smoothly on to harvest, many producers in the Yellowstone Valley around Sidney received significant hail damage which really knocked back the sugar beets and leveled many wheat and barley stands.

All in all, however, I would still dub this year’s harvest as a success across the board.  There certainly were challenges along the way, but I think that most of the crop came in with fairly decent yields.

Small Grains- I always try to find hard and fast facts whenever possible because in discussing the crop with producers I typically only get reports when the crop is either really good or really bad.  So for a report on the wheat and barley crop, I turned to the harvest reports from the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee (http://wbc.agr.mt.gov/wbc/Buyers/Quality_reports/).

This report does not have yield figures for Eastern Montana, but my assumption based on anecdotal evidence (barber shop talk) is that the winter, spring, and durum wheats all yielded fairly well.  Test weights, according to the statistics were up but protein was down quite a bit.  While this information encompasses all of Eastern Montana, I feel it is a pretty fair assessment of the results we found here in Richland County.

There is no hard and fast data on the 2013 barley crop that I could find.  However, I believe it fared just as well as the wheat crop did, with one exception.  For whatever reason, much of the crop that was harvested early had a considerable amount of sprout damage and, as such, did not make malting quality.  As harvest progressed, I believe that this situation became less drastic but there was quite a bit of the first few fields that were harvested that had to be sent into the feed barley market. 

Alfalfa and other Hay- Fortunately for our livestock producers, we had another good hay year.  With last year’s crop not being so great, this hopefully helped to alleviate some concerns with having enough hay to get through the winter.  This can be supported by the most recent weekly Montana Hay report out of Billings (http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/bl_gr310.txt)   which states that “All classes of hay continue to trend steady.  Interest is very light to light for all classes of hay, with light to moderate demand….  Hay supplies are adequate assuming that they don't receive a very hard winter that lasts late into spring.

Sugarbeets- I would say that the sugarbeet campaign this year was another successful one.  Harvest seemed to progress rather quickly this year compared to others.  Tonnage appeared to be pretty good but sugar content was maybe not as high as it has been in the past.  I was pleasantly surprised to see how fast the sugar beet crop that got hailed out in and around Sidney put new leaves on and continued to grow.  This however, did not help with increasing the sugar content of the crop.

Corn- I really have not heard much of anything in regards to the corn crop.  I believe that just about all of the crop is harvested and this was a really good year for corn production.  We started off the year lacking the heat units to get the crop going but made up for it in the middle and end of the crop’s production cycle.  The problem with the corn crop that was harvested for grain is that much of the nation had a good corn growing season and, as such, prices are not as strong as they have been in the past.  This is not a concern for those that harvest to corn for silage though and I assume that there was plenty of good silage harvested.

Pulse Crops and oilseeds- Our pulse crop and oilseed producers I would guess are pretty happy with this year’s crop.  There were a few fields that had some disease issues because of the wet spring that we had but all in all, it was a pretty good year for these crops as well.  The weather cooperated for the most part when it was time to harvest and this allowed for a fairly quick harvest period.

I guess that all in all, one could classify this year’s harvest as another fairly successful one.  There were localized bouts of hail and wind damage that completely leveled some crops, grazing land, and hay stands but even in most of those spots, a fair amount of the crop was able to be harvested. 

In closing, I just want to say as sincerely as possible, thank you to those of you who spend your lives making sure that the rest of us have food on our plate.  I truly appreciate all that you do and I know it’s a thankless job most of the time.



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