Ohio’s Main Crops Expected to Have a Greater Yield in 2020
Ohio’s corn, soybean and wheat crops are predicted to have a higher yield than in 2019 despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Crop yields are measured in bushels per acre. The weight of a bushel depends on the crop, according to Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. A bushel of corn is 56 pounds while a bushel of soybeans or wheat is 60 pounds.
The corn crop yield is anticipated to be 173 bushels per acre which exceeds last year’s yield of 164 bushels per acre, according to the state statistician for USDA NASS in Ohio, Cheryl Turner.
Meanwhile, the yield for soybeans is expected to be 56 bushels per acre, she said. This would be the second-highest yield of all time behind 2018’s record of 58 bushels per acre.
The final yields for this year’s corn and soybeans crop will be released in early January after everything is harvested, she said. The projected numbers are not likely to change much in the upcoming months.
“We could tweak a little bit I mean, generally, this late in the year, you will see no change in planted or harvest acres and maybe a bushel or two,” Turner said.
Wheat crops grow during different seasons than corn and soybeans, she said. Wheat is planted in the fall and harvested the next summer. Since the 2020 harvest is over already, USDA NASS has official numbers for the wheat crop. In 2020, the yield was 71 bushels per acre compared to last year’s 56 bushels acre.
The weather was the biggest factor for 2019’s low yield compared to 2020’s, she said. Last year, it rained significantly in April and May which prevented farmers from planting seeds.
“And as you drove through Ohio and what you should be driving by are beautiful green corn and soybean fields and they just laid there without any crops in them and weeds were getting out of control,” said Ty Higgins, director of media relations for the Ohio Farm Bureau.
The conditions need to be very specific in order for a crop to be successful.
“So you basically need, quite honestly a couple, a couple dry days in a row, like, really dry to dry it up enough,” Turner said, “because if you put the seed in there when it’s really wet it truthfully, it will rot, or it will wash away with all the rain we had last year.”
Farming through a pandemic
“One thing about rural Ohio and agriculture is that we’ve been social distancing for a very long time,” Higgins said.
While the COVID-19 pandemic shut down businesses in March and left thousands unemployed, farmers continued on.
“When it seemed like the world stopped in its tracks, farmers were still farming,” Higgins said.
In soybean, wheat and corn production, Higgins said farmers rely on global trade to sell and make money. Once COVID-19 hit, the trade declined which also caused the prices to drop.
In order to make money, the farmers needed to produce more product so they could sell more. The higher crop yields this year allowed farmers to sell more.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to even things out with the prices they’re getting for those crops and be able to pay the bills at the end of the year,” Higgins said.
Madisyn Woodring completed the section on Cheryl Turner and the Infogram graphs.
Lauren Sasala completed the section on Ty Higgins and took the featured image.
