Arkansas ag: $650 million hit
Nov 11, 2009 10:45 AM, By David Bennett, Farm Press Editorial Staff
“USDA had projected a 131 million bushel soybean production for Arkansas. We looked at that and said, ‘Man, it sounds like with the damage and losses in production and everything, we could lose at least 25 percent of this year’s soybean crop.’”
“There’s also a bit of corn in the field. We had a similar situation with grain sorghum earlier and there was tremendous dockage.”
Combine all those factors and it “adds up to major, major dollars lost in the farm economy. This will put individual farmers in desperate straits as far as breaking even or paying some debt down. The losses they’ll experience and the amount of money they had invested in those crops” won’t allow them to.
Asked about the SURE program — and potential 2009 disaster payments coming more than a year from now — and Martin says the set-up “is a difficult thing. You’d hate to see a situation where it’ll be 18 months, or farther, down the line before there’s some relief. Every (grower) is dealing with financial institutions with loans for the past year. I anticipate that the lending institutions know the situation but anytime there’s a delay it’ll be a problem for the producers.”
Farmers are wondering, “‘How am I going to get financed? How will I recoup losses moving into the next farm year?’ We’re not far away. We’re only in the first week of November, but farmers are already thinking about what they’ll produce next year, where, or if, they’ll get financing, all of those things. It makes for a difficult situation.”
And it could get worse. The figures cited in the Arkansas Farm Bureau report “are a beginning point and when we were doing that, we were still looking at rainy forecasts for (Oct. 28 and 29). Those were heavy, heavy rains for some areas. Southeast Arkansas received 5 to 6 inches over that 24- to 48-hour period. That added insult to injury.
“It’s an ongoing thing. If we can have two weeks of (good) weather, it’ll make a huge dent in the harvest. But we have a forecast for (the week of Nov. 9) of another system moving through. Rain chances aren’t huge, right now, but that can change.”
Some areas remain flooded and “it’s difficult for farmers to get in. I think we’ll see farmers with problems in preparing land (for the next crop). There are huge ruts in some areas. The farmers can’t wait for the ground to solidify and they’re rutting and cutting it up. There will be (extra) costs incurred in getting the fields ready for the next crop.”
Much of the Mid-South is in similar straits. “There are similar problems in the upper Mississippi Delta and northern Louisiana — although their crops were a little earlier and harvest was further along than Arkansas.’ There are concerns in the Missouri Bootheel with cotton and other crops.”
