Any 2019 grain that remains in storage should be moved out ASAP. The quality is not good, and any storage life that the crop had has been used up completely. Recent movements on-farm are coming in at 17% or 18% moisture with no shelf life remaining.
Under current conditions, it looks like harvest will have a relatively early start in 2020. In my home state of Iowa, that could be the week after Labor Day. I usually present a pre-harvest outlook in September at a GEAPS Greater Iowa chapter meeting in September, but this year, it could be at the start of harvest.
If we had a 16-billion-bushel corn crop, as USDA originally forecast, that would translate into a carryover in 2021 of 3.1 billion bushels, somewhat predicated on demand. Soybean carryover would be 246 million bushels, relatively small compared to corn. Recent revisions reduce crop size to around 15 billion bushels and carryover to around 2.6 billion bushels.
So here are my tips for handling the 2020 crop going into harvest:
- Plan to rotate all 2019 crops out of storage. You can’t store it, and if you try, expect a lot of hot spots and blue eye mold. Vomitoxin will be there, as well.
- Aeration won’t help with blue eye mold, which grows under hot, dry conditions, but it will help with any other type of mold. Any cool period in the coming months is a good time to aerate. Use dewpoint as a guideline.
- Send potential grain graders on staff for training as soon as possible. Send out samples for official grading, and use the results to calibrate your equipment and people. Even if you disagree with the results, they are official.
- Prepare to store a lot of corn. Exports are up, but they won’t bail you out right at harvest.
- On-farm storage will fill up rapidly. Be ready for a “cavalry charge” of grain to the elevator around mid-October, if the weather cooperates.
- Adopt measures to protect grain for long-term storage. Sort grain for longer term storage by test weight. Clean to a lower level of FM than your normal standards. Also, dry grain to a lower percent moisture than your usual standards, half a point to a point. Maintain and upgrade your temperature monitoring system to make sure you can catch anything going on in storage before actual symptoms show up; the interface between new and old corn will always be prone to spoilage. Consider trying carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring. Expect the unexpected; market signals and incentives for storage change rapidly, so leave longer term storage options open. Core long-term storage bins multiple times during fill.
Reprinted from Grain Journal July/August 2020 Issue