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There are several ways you can manage weather risk beyond crop and wind/hail insurance.

November 6, 2020

2 Min Read
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I’m trying to set yield goals for 2021 by individual fields and farms. How do I know how much emphasis to put on individual limiting factors like soil type and annual precipitation? Is there a way to lower risk from weather extremes? - L.T. – Ohio

Without irrigation, most of us operate within an exogenous production function, which simply means that over 50% of the factors that influence our production are beyond our control. The quick answer is that soil type and weather deserve ALL the emphasis, with the latter being the most supreme.

Wow, did 2020 ever confirm this assessment. In 30 years of managing Iowa farms we had never seen such an excellent start, as planting timeliness more than compensated for setbacks from the cold. By early July there were significant drought issues and by the middle of August there were disastrous wind issues.  In Illinois, the very dry August took the record soybean yield projections off the table.

Your APH, or actual production history, is the baseline for all budgets and yield projections. We encourage sensitivity analysis, starting at 10% below to 10% above your APH yields. We recommend dropping the low and the high out of the 8-10 years of yield history.

You can moderate weather risk with crop insurance and wind/hail coverage. A solid agronomic program that gets the crop off to a superior start can moderate mid to late season stress.  For us, this includes two separate recipes of starter fertilizer delivered at planting, high speed planter technologies, soil fungicides, and hog manure. The amount of tile drainage and compaction elimination you employ also reduce weather risk. Selecting a portion of your seed with greater drought tolerance and superior ear flex, at more moderate populations, mitigate drought risk even further.

Related:4 tips for planning your 2021 weed control strategy

Planting timeliness is perhaps the most significant way to moderate weather risk.  So even though we prefer early May corn planting to April for its warmer soils, we still plan for the first half of our corn seeding to go in the last half of April for risk management (when the soils are fit, of course).

 

 - Jerry and Jason Moss operate Moss Family Farms, Inc., a first-generation corn and contract hog operation in western Illinois. Have a question for Manager's Notebook? Send emails to [email protected].

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