“I think most farming operations are going pretty good, but like I said, we’re all weather-dependent.”
Now that pollination is beginning for her corn, she’ll be praying for slow, soaking rains — not ones that rush off the fields — so the ears get enough moisture to mature properly. She and Dave grow field corn, not sweet corn that people eat, but the kind that will be exported for grain and animal feed. They also grow soybeans, for about 700 total acres of crops this year.
With Butler County farmers overall, “I would say they’re doing fairly well,” said JT Benitez, the agriculture and natural resources educator for Ohio State University’s Butler County extension office. “It wasn’t like last year, with the monsoon rains. It was rainy there in the beginning, but a lot of folks had enough breaks to get stuff in.”
Farmers have been harvesting hay for the past three weeks, and dry weather helps them with that, Benitez said. Meanwhile, farmers’ markets have been booming, and nurseries are doing well, “because everyone’s raising gardens at home,” he said. Some people have been getting chickens and having their own eggs.
“As far as the livestock, a lot of people who have been raising freezer pork or freezer beef, they’ve been very, very busy because with a lot of the meat-shortage concern, a lot of people were turning to the smaller producers, and buying right off of the farm,” Benitez added. “So they’ve built a new customer base they haven’t had before.”
Ross Olson, manager of Oxford’s farmers market, agreed demand for locally grown produce and local meat “is incredibly high this season, I think due to the shortages that people were experiencing at the grocery store early on.”
Market vendors have told him they’ve had a pretty good year, Olson said. And local livestock farmers have been very busy.
“To be honest with you, I haven’t seen very much of a lot of our livestock producers, because many of them have avenues of selling their product outside the market, and they’ve been so busy and had so much demand on their own that some of them haven’t been coming to the farmers’ market,” Olson said.
Rural Roulette
Almost everyone knows farming is risky because of weather and other factors. But Lierer knows better than most because she operates the Gail Lierer Crop Insurance Agency. Not only are farmers’ fortunes affected by the weather and what crops they plant, but what day they decide to plant, plus how long their crop hybrid takes to mature. Some corn develops in 90 days, other kinds in 119. And then there are worldwide economic factors that affect crop prices.
This year Lierer received insurance claims from wheat farmers who had to re-plant their crops because anything planted on May 18 “got hammered in the ground, and then we had 3 or 4 inches (of rain) that week,” she said.
Some corn farmers couldn’t plant when they wanted because it was too wet, but then the ground turned too hard and dry, and they already had products sprayed on their fields for corn, so they couldn’t switch over to planting beans.
“I’m hopeful everybody has a good crop,” Lierer said, “because last year it wasn’t so good, but it’s time. We need some good crops, and we need some good prices. So we need to see how this all works out. We need some good export markets, and with the U.S.-Canada-Mexico agreement, I think we will see more of that.”
Meanwhile, tariffs “aren’t good for anybody, except for the country that’s collecting them, of course,” she said. “I would like to see some of those dropped so we could go back to our open-trade agreements.”
Crop prices have been fluctuating from week to week. A week ago, they were up. This week, they were down.
Lierer also serves on the Ohio Corn Marketing Checkoff Board, which uses the 0.75-cent charge that is collected from each bushel of corn when it is sold at elevators. That money is used for marketing of Ohio corn, research, and also spreading the word about the benefits of the crops. A few years ago, she hosted a trade delegation from Japan. This week, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman or his staff will visit.
“Farming’s a gamble. You’ve got to love it or hate it. We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t like it,” she said.
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