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.
