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southern MN | Do you account for the moisture dock in your figures?
Do you feel the company you sell corn to would pay you more if you delivered the crop yourself, so you indeed have some money invested in transportation no matter what?
In your first messages, those transport & drying $$$ you say are not important? But aren't you getting charged for them as well?
I think they are indeed part of the cost of raising a crop. If one is comparing one crop to the next.
Seems very simple to me.
If you compare the costs of raising corn, beans, & wheat to each other, I think we need to compare all the costs - including those associated with harvest.
These are costs we cannot escape from, and are not related to marketing. Sounds like you get a great deal, not something I have ever seen around this location. Nonetheless, their bid for your corn contains the extra moisture and hauling built into their bid - you are paying the transport & shrink. It seems you do not understand that these costs are hidden in your bid?
If we are saying the same thing, one of us is doing so poorly. Again, I was not part of the other discussion, so if I missed picking something up from that, my appologies.
Your arrangement of picking up the crop in the field by the buyer is pretty much unheard of around here, so not something I'd bother to pencil out. Different conditions in different locations.
I can sell a bale of hay for $2.00, and charge 50 cents to deliver & stack it. Or I can sell a bale of hay for $2.50, and offer free delivery..... Either way, cost comparisons will have to factor in the transport & handling - they are there. Right? Either way, the cost of transport is part of the cost of hay, right?
Whether I dry my grain & haul it away for a premium price, or you dump wet grain in someone else's truck and get a check that is discounted - we both ned to figure the hauling & discount into our final numbers don't we?
Those of us that can't get in-field pickup during harvest don't have much choice but to haul the grain somewhere, and those offering us a price around here want it adjusted to 14.5% moisture or we get docked heavily. So here, we need to account for the cost of hauling away 3x as much material from a cornfield as we need to haul away from a soybean field. And, we need to allow for the much lower than posted price we get for wet corn, OR allow for $25 an acre or so of drying costs.
These are real dollars that corn will cost us per acre or per bu vs other crops, and we need to account for them.
Took along time for my FFA advisor to understand that too, and I wasn't the one doing the arguing back then. He was working out of a book, a few of my classmates were working in the real world and noticed that discrepency right off.
Glad you have a market that doesn't discount, but that is pretty rare.
Going to be interesting when bio-ethanol ramps up, and buyers & sellers of the crop material work out the transportation costs of such a high volume item. Will be a similar thing, pay a lot of the material, but unless you are 2 miles from the plant, it will get eaten up in transport costs.
No biggie. You have a very good oppertunity where you are, so you don't have to look at some of the realities others of us need to. I can understand that.
Going to warm up tomorrow, so I will move on too. :)
--->Paul | |
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For Loran: Cost of growing c & sb
