CHAMPAIGN COUNTY, Ill. (WCIA) — Illinois as a whole is looking at a record-setting yield for crops this year. But farmers also have to worry about a carryover of old crops from last year. Now, some farmers are stressed about storage.
“Everything’s taking up space. And so space is definitely at a premium this year,” said Greg Johnson, grain originator at Total Grain Marketing in Champaign.
Tuscola fertilizer plant nears construction after more than a decade Farmers in the grain belt are seeing increased bushel carryouts, or the amount left over at the end of a marketing year after demand is subtracted.
Nationally, there are 200 million more bushel carry outs than usual for corn — and 100 million more for soybeans. The top producing states are Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois.
“We have to find a place to put that surplus grain because we can’t move it all in the fall,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that demand has not kept up with production.
“China is the biggest wildcard in all that,” he added. “If China would come in and buy a bunch of beans, we could ship beans down to the Gulf, ship them over to China, and that would alleviate a lot of the space pressure. That’s what happened last year. We were able to ship a lot of grain last year to China.”
Corn production could be causing cancer in Illinois, new study says This means that until the market can digest the surplus, farmers need to find temporary storage.
“We’re going to be putting corn outside in the back of the elevator temporarily until we can make space and move that,” Johnson said.
Chris Karr has been a farmer in Seymour for 54 years.
“One of the problems is going to be our equipment is so big, and we’re pretty efficient, and we’ll just harvest as fast as we can,” Karr said. “We’ll probably get limited by the space in the grain elevators.”
To solve the issue, Karr said farmers will need to manage their time at grain facilities.
“We’ll bring our grain out to the co-ops, and then we’ll work on the on-farm storage if they have storage,” Karr said. “And then they’re just going to be kind of depending on that grain moving out of this area. If it doesn’t move out very fast, we’ll probably have to stop or limit harvesting.”
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