2015 a Year Full of Market Surprises
When the rain started in mid-May across the Eastern Cornbelt, farmers welcomed the moisture to germinate the newly planted crop. But when it didn’t stop, it quickly became a crisis. By midsummer, Purdue experts were predicting a total loss for many fields. Yet in the end, things turned out better than anticipated. Arlan Suderman, with F C Stone, says the genetics in our seeds carried the day, “Just think how big our crop would have been if the rains had not pounded parts of Indiana and Ohio.” He added, while farmers in Indiana thought they were going to have big yield losses, that is not how it turned out in the end, “When you look at how the final numbers turned out, it certainly surprised me. I did not think the good corn would be good enough to offset the bad corn.”
Suderman says, in retrospect, the market did a good job of properly assessing the size and value of this year’s crop, “The market factored it in better than we anticipated. The big spike in July was short covering based on the weather concerns; and then, when harvest began, the market moved lower and did a better job than I did in determining where we would eventually end up.” The final USDA numbers on the 2015 crop will be released on January 12.
