an agricultural season is an iffy sort of thing...all sorts of variables...wind, drought, hail, locusts, too wet to plant...manifold paths to disaster...or success...it is what it is and this season hasn't changed all that much since i last wandered out into the industrial fields mostly because, beyond the possibility of weather related factors it couldn't..may was too wet to plant and that set the agenda...so, just like last post, most of the planted fields here are soybeans...
some dense yellow #2 did make it in and what was planted seems to be doing well...acres of corn cities with the residents packed in in ever increasing densities...i would be willing to wager those plants are no more than two to four inches apart in rows thirty inches apart...the gene wizards at monsanto can make the plants behave in clearly unnatural ways...buffalo bird woman would have none of that "if the corn hills were so close together that the plants, when they grew up, touched each other, we called them 'smell-each-other'; and we knew that the ears they bore would not be plump or large." [wilson 1917]...modern agriculture counts on it...
and there are still a considerable number of fields that went unplanted and have been plowed under several times seemingly to control the growth of "native plants"...basically an exercise in fuel consumption, greenhouse gasses, and erosion...and the natives keep returning...what has changed, remarkably from my perspective, is commodity prices...soybeans are down $40.78 per metric ton from their closing price for july...understandable given current trade policies evinced by the nation's leadership..more puzzling is dense yellow #2 is down $37.16 a metric ton since july and has been falling since the usda released its corn acreage estimate...something doesn't add up here...someone has a distorted view...either i have a very local anomaly going on or the usda has cooked the books...it will all shake out come autumn and the harvest...a month or two yet.
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