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O’Mara warns not to put too much stock in yield contests

1.29.2008

By BRUCE HOTCHKISS
Senior Editor

EASTON, Md. — Commodity yield contests have a downside.
Coupled with current farm gate prices, which farmers are receiving for corn, soybeans and wheat, the contest results often encourage landowners to seek increased rents on their farm fields.
That picture is badly out of focus, said Jerry O’Mara, Talbot County Farm Bureau president.
What the landowners don’t realize, or take into consideration, he said, is that yield contest results are inflated, that rarely— if ever — do they reflect the harvest from the rest of the farm, and even the rest of the same field.
“For a yield contest, you pick the best field and the best rows you’ve got,” said O’Mara, a former Talbot County farm manager.
Also, O’Mara said, landowners likely are not aware, that just as commodity prices are rising, so are the costs of simply growing the crop.
Across Maryland, according to a precise survey, it will cost farmers this year an average of $3.43 a bushel to grow 150 bushel-an-acre conventionally tilled corn and an average of $3.13 a bushel to grow the same crop no-till on non-irrigated land.
Soybeans? $7.68 a bushel. Wheat? $5.20 a bushel.
The cost of every crop input, from seed to fertilizer to fuel, is going up, O’Mara said. “A farmer has to get a better price for his crop just to break even,” O’Mara said.
According to the USDA’s Ag Statistics Service, the average yield for corn in Maryland in 2007 was 103 bushels an acre; that’s down 22 percent from 2006 and the lowest corn production in the state since the drought of 2002.
“The state’s average yield is a true picture of how the farmers fared last year,” said O’Mara. “Problem is, contest yields are reported and published and landowners see them and think they should get in on the action. They need to know that when it costs a farmer $3.50 to grow a bushel a corn and his field gives him less than 100 bushels an acre, nobody is getting rich.”