Time
A) total BS................. Crop ratings have the sole purpose of trying to predict outcome in terms of yield.............. what other term of measuring the crop is there.... We could sure save a lot of money in ticket printing and scales if we could drive up and sell our great crop and price it as a great crop by the acre based on its judged condition ---like tobacco................. "USDA said it was best ever". That's great Bill, here's your blue ribbon. Dump it over in that ground pile. I'll get a call in to the area fsa office and see if we can you a check for you effort....... we got too much of that worthless stuff.
We are talking about a process that is supposed to help with federal budgeting...... NASS statistics..... disconneted from reality so we can celebrate success every year and pat the statisticians on the back without a concern for accuracy. Just another taxpayer rape.. Fullfilling 0 purpose in terms of economic outcome.
B) the final yield for beans will be whatever usda says it is. If you doubt that just ask them. That is what we talk about or are directed to talk about by those with the know in "marketing" circles.
I start shaking my head when one of us ----- or most of us......... start trying to correlate our personal actual, accross the scales yield results with the hocus pocus shell game you refer to, carried out by federal employees who claim to raise a crop every year in an ever increasing success story.
Those clowns never sell a bushel or load a ship.
Marketing is selling what you produced......... widgets to soybeans........ that is marketing........ something usda never does........ Yet their press releases are all we talk about here in the "run on, repost, nostalgia format.
If a producer who actually markets discusses real marketing.... it can't mean anything to the rest of us...... after all he has been doing it for decades and what does he know?
Real corn yields will probably be shifted to the Crop forum if reported by a producer..... so here goes........Corn ....Irrigated yields at 201 average over our area.... that is 30 bushel below last year and normal expectations. Irrigated yields with august hail (15 %of local acres) 113 average .............
Dry land corn yields 70 bu/a...... average expectations.......
% of fields infested with fumonicin 98% (the crop insurance maximum level of 2.1 ppm--- tests regionally as high as 500 ppm---our average 15 ppm)
% of loads of corn being rejected by the major cattle feeder in the area 60% in the texas panhandle.... less in ks but still too many....(feedlot will allow 60 ppm) (seaboard 30 ppm) ethanol less than that.
this week Bartlett began rejecting loads delivered from the harvest field, in fear that they will not have enough to blend it down.
This is the stuff that real marketing is about.......
