Looking at the harvest, at the start of this week statewide we were down to the final 22% of the corn needing harvested, and the final 11% of the soybeans. But the questions remain: can we get it moved, and can we get it stored? As the Vermilion County Farm Bureau’s Tom Fricke points out, you not only have barges slowed by low river waters, but also the threat of a rail strike.
AUDIO: A lot of grain is not moving on barges that normally does. So more of it has transferred to rail. And if we have a rail strike, you’re going to see a lot of things move to a standstill; which is really going to impact farmers. Not everybody has on farm storage, or enough on farm storage, especially giving the good yields that we’ve had this year.
Right now, a lot of elevators cannot move much grain, so they not only have limited capacity, but their ability to dry grain after they take it in is limited. So they’re asking farmers, bring your grain in at a low moisture percentage.
AUDIO: Sometimes elevators would have a bin that they could put a little wetter corn in and run some air on it. But if they’re full of everything, they don’t have those storage options that they might have at this point in the season in the normal years.
Fricke says, this is the point in the harvest where the race is on to finish, so every little thing preventing that adds to the pressure.
