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DON’T CALL ME AN EXPERT This is just the way I do things Dealing with the 2006 Drought By Mike Meier “Mike, where do we go from here?” When you’re custom harvesting, and you know the next farm in the next town you’re headed to, that’s pretty simple to answer. But when your wife asks that question after a big crop disaster like this year, “Mike, where do we go from here?” That question takes on a whole new meaning, and it’s tough to give an answer.
Farming would be much easier on my family life during the summer compared to farming plus custom harvesting, but it is nice to be diversified. Often leaving for the Oklahoma wheat harvest during soybean and sunflower planting time, my dad John finishes the planting. I have some great local agronomists who help me make decisions while I am gone, along with the man behind the spray rig that applies my chemicals. I rely on all of these people greatly while I am gone. It’s when the growing season doesn’t cooperate when things get frustrating, both for custom harvesting and for farming. And custom harvesting, I had the (mis)fortune of experiencing this summer’s drought as it spread from the South to our own farm in the North. In mid April we were in the process of planting our spring wheat and barley into extremely dry conditions. Staring at outrageous input costs, but still the constant need to produce more, we did not even think about cutting any corners. The rain will come! I kept telling myself that. Meanwhile in a small town in southern Oklahoma, a farmer who I harvest grain for was staring at a complete crop failure. He called me while I was planting wheat and said “Mike! Where do you go from here?” My response being “Kansas!” He then replied with “That is where you will have to start your harvest this summer. There is no need for you to make this thousand mile journey with your crew and sit here and do nothing.” Just like that, almost 20% of my anticipated harvesting income evaporated. It didn’t get much better in Kansas, where I suppose the wheat harvest was off by about 30% to 50%, at least in the areas where we cut. This thing followed us up into S.D. where we usually work, where out of 3,500 acres only one 80-acre parcel was worth cutting. The drought landed on our doorstep in Zeeland, where the crops were suffering fierce heat and lack of moisture. There was little to no subsoil moisture from last year, and from the beginning of the year until August we received less than 2” of total moisture. Heat added insult to injury. I can remember on six different days that my thermometer showed 114 degrees or warmer for the high, climbing to 118.6 on one Sunday afternoon. My barley was between six and eight inches tall at the normal time of harvest. We never bothered to combine it. Some of my wheat we harvested yielded less than ten bushels an acre. My dad finished planting the last of my soybeans on the third of June. By the fall I found only a dozen or so of those plants that even germinated above the soil – now that’s dry, when there’s not even enough soil moisture for the beans to germinate! With all the talk of drought, there sure seemed to be a lot of reports of good yields around the region, making the situation even more frustrating for us “have-nots.” For some parts of eastern N.D., “drought” still meant a record sugar beet harvest, and in other areas all of the pot holes finally got seeded and the quality of the wheat crop was better than ever. Being drier than normal is a lot different than a knock-down drought. Shortcomings of crop insurance The custom harvesting business brought in less than half of a normal year. This really is a burden for us due to the high cost of insurance, licensing, fuel , etc. The farm as a whole basically turned into a total crop insurance claim on almost every acre. Our loss is going to be around $50 an acre across the farm. Between the loss of revenue on the farm side and the harvesting business we are staring at a loss of almost one third of our net worth in less than a year. Most of my crop insurance yields at this time are still close to county averages, although the 2002 crop was also affected by drought, and most of the 2003 crop was harvested by the big white combine from the sky. Even in those two years I have yet to have a total failure like this year. My crop insurance protection on wheat is only 18 bushels an acre multiplied by the revenue assurance price which usually leads to somewhere between $70 and $80/ac. Beans are only 16 bu/ac which actually gave us more coverage this year than wheat because the selected price for beans is around $6.20 per bushel. County yields for sunflowers are 1,233 lb/ac multiplied by my 65% level of coverage equals 801 lbs times $11.75 per hundred totaling $94.12 per acre. Other farmers would know that none of these crop insurance payments will cover our inputs of well over $100 per acre before any harvest costs. We are just two miles from the South Dakota border. It is interesting to know that just across the state line there is much better county yield averages for wheat, beans, and especially corn. We only currently have a silage tonnage yield here for corn and they have a grain yield of close to 70 bu/ac giving them much better coverage. For this reason alone I do not plant any corn at all. I feel the inputs are too high to raise corn in this droughty area I live. If it does not make grain I do not have use for silage because I do not raise any cattle, probably a good thing this year. A lot of the local cattlemen did not have adequate feed or pasture. There were guys sometimes 200 miles from home hauling equipment, water, or hay. I can say that the practice of no-till definitely helped these crops to survive as long as possible, but no matter what you do in a drought like this nothing can work. The other day I met with my lender. I have always felt that being honest and upfront early is always the right way to do business. Telling where we are and where we hope to be by the end of the year is a hard thing when you stare at such a shortage, but again, here we are looking at that question, “where do we go from here?” I would not want to be on the other side of the bank desk. Telling a family farmer that next year is no more would have to be difficult, like telling someone of the loss of a loved one. Fortunately, it did not get to that point this year for me. Do not take this story in the wrong perspective. I do not want people to feel sorry for me. We all hold our own shovels and dig where we want. Back to the initial question, “where do we go from here?” Well, we move on as though the drought never happened, and hope for better weather next year. If I start trying to cut corners to cut costs we might just miss the best crop and harvest run we have ever had, and that would be a wound which I caused myself. So hopefully we’ll catch up on some moisture this fall and with snow over the winter, and we regroup next spring, hoping that the good prices and the lower fuel costs continue, and that we just get a few more rain clouds. We all farm on optimism, right? |
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I am a 29 year old
farmer and custom harvester from Zeeland, N.D. Jen and I have been married for six years and have three children. She has followed on our custom harvest trail from Texas to the Canadian border every
chance she gets. I started my harvesting business in 1997 just one year after I graduated from high school, and my first cropland was rented in 1999. Today I have built my harvesting business to the level
where I want it. I have two John Deere combines, a tractor and grain cart, and three trucks. Currently, I rent 1,200 acres of crop ground and it is on the farming side of the business where I want to expand. 