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Corn loses glow with farmers

11.05.2008 16:00 Shopping - Source: toledoblade.com

WHEN CORN prices surged to $6 a bushel last fall because of higher demand for the fuel additive ethanol, Henry County farmer Dan Durham thought about planting more corn this spring and reaping a bigger payday.

He didn’t think about it long.

“You know, $6 corn is nice but the inputs are a lot more too. It’s tempting, but it isn’t,” said Mr. Durham.

He will plant about 380 acres of corn this season near Napoleon, the same as last season.

“You have to look at the whole picture,” he added.

For farmers in northwest Ohio, this year’s picture includes skyrocketing prices (because of $120-a-barrel oil) for fertilizer and pesticides, surging costs for diesel fuel and gasoline to run machinery, a lengthy winter, and an extremely wet spring that is hampering efforts to get corn planted.

Those factors and others have dampened enthusiasm this season for corn and will lead to a decrease in the state’s corn crop, experts said.

Instead, more land will be in soybeans, which are fetching better prices and cost less to plant.

“Corn planting is down and soybeans are up. I think it’s a combination of rotating crops, and your production input for corn is now greater than for soybeans,” said Wayne Matthews, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Ohio field office.

“Corn already was up 15 percent last year over the previous year. There wasn’t that much more land out there to have an increase like that anyway,” he said.

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Corn loses glow with farmers

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