2014 LOGAN COUNTY FARM OUTLOOK MAGAZINE LINCOLN DAILY NEWS.com MARCH 27, 2014 13
Doug Thompson, a producer
in the northern part of Logan
County, near Atlanta, said it is
very important to manage the
entire operation with precision and
know where you are all the time.
Thompson, who also teaches a
short course on the subject every
year for Lincoln Land Community
College, says that careful cost
accounting and keeping careful
track of productivity can certainly
make quite a difference in the
results of the entire operation.
Sloppy management brings worse
results. Thompson said he really
enjoys the class and always learns
a lot every year being the teacher.
When asked what he was going
to do differently for the upcoming
season, Whitson said it is difficult
to make short-term course
corrections, because the time
commitments for the upcoming
crop are very close to the harvest
time of the previous crop. “By the
time we have the crop out of the
field, we have made most of our
commitments for the upcoming
year,” he said.
In the long term, Whitson said
he planned to do more no-till
planting, figure out how to cut
costs and get the inputs down.
When asked if he was going to
shift more into beans, Whitson
said he maintained it at 50-50 and
didn’t think he would make any
changes there. He cited that the
price for corn had edged up about
50 cents since the harvest because
the market predicts a shift into
beans, of which there continues
to be a shortage. This shift into
beans will lower the total acreage
devoted to corn and has helped
raise the price of corn based on
futures.
Both Whitson and Thompson are
big believers in on-farm storage.
They both have facilities to store
just about everything they produce,
and they carefully watch the
current market prices to try to gain
an advantage when prices edge up.
When asked if they thought
there might be a shift away from
sharecropping by landlords, both
Thompson and Whitson said
no. And Whitson believes that
competition between producers
steers the price of cash rent.
Although there is a great deal of
competition for access to acreage,
all the producers face the same
market stresses, and pressure from
the producers helps convey how
they are willing to participate with
landlords.
When asked to predict what the
upcoming season will bring,
Whitson said we are currently dry
and that the recent rains and snows
are not helping groundwater levels,
because the ground is frozen down
to as much as 24 inches in some
areas. All that water ran off and
raised the levels of creeks and
streams but didn’t do anything
for the available groundwater. We
don’t know yet when spring will
break or if it will be wet, but if it is
a wet spring, “rain makes grain.”
Both Whitson and Thompson
acknowledged that there is
definitely a kind of competition
in farming. When somebody does
well and all the rest have poor
productivity, the one who did well
is rewarded generously. When
everyone does well in productivity,
everybody is punished equally.
Unfortunately, in order to have a
higher price, some portion of the
country or world has to have a
poorer yield. “Nobody you know
or anybody specific,” he said. But
then again, he really doesn’t wish
that on anybody.
Continued to page 14
