"Catch Up" with the CropSpotters

May 15, 2013

The summer crops are done across Brazil, and Southern producers have spent more time lately looking at winter crop for cover and silage, and,, up in Mato Grosso, at finishing up a promising second-crop corn season.

Paraná CropSpotter Rodolpho Botelho merely points out that his 2012-13 soybeans ended up delivering a yield “a little better than expected, with the main-crop corn a little lower than expected. “ Then he’s on to canola planting—a crop he’s trying again after a hiatus. And, he says, by mid-May he was still planting oats for cover, and for later no-till. And in other fields, it’s “oats and rye to feed cattle.”

In terms of the coming summer crops, some of Botelho’s prep work has started, like applying lime, he says. And some inputs for the 2013-14 soybean crop have been picked up. Botelho says he’s bought some of his glyphosate for the coming season, at a “very expensive” $17.00 per gallon, as well as 18-36-00 fertilizer at a cost of $522 per ton—and he’s starting to shop prices for his other inputs.

Also down in Paraná state, CropSpotter João Conrado Schmidt noted that producers are starting to get some of next season’s inputs together, and they, too “have notices prices are higher compared to last season.

He’s also planting oats for both cover and to harvest as seed and for sale. And once he’s done, he says “the planters are ready to plant barley for malt production.” Meanwhile, wheat production in his region will be record, with “the limiting factor on the wheat area being the scarcity of seed.”

Aside from that, Schmidt notes a yield of 25 bushels per acre of buckwheat, which is “well worth it, as cropping costs are low.” And a recent frost in his area has moved the clock forward 20 days on producing silage from sorghum as winter feed for his cattle.

Farther north, in Mato Grosso, CropSpotter Ademir Rostirolla has been dealing with above-average rains, at the end of April and to the mid-point of May. This year, some 5.9 inches have fallen, versus only about 3.1 inches in the same period of 2012. And that’s been good for his second-crop corn, which “is coming along without pest pressure.”
“Eighty percent of the crop is out of danger, even if the rains were to totally shut off now,” he says. His prediction is that he’ll harvest more than 127 bushels per acre when all is said and done. The problem is, he says, that “with the corn, the logistics system getting the product to the port is a big problem because of high freight costs. Producer prices around here probably won’t exceed $2.53 per bushel.”

Until then, Rostirolla is keeping an eye out for a soybean futures price that will make sense for the coming crop “now that inputs costs are higher.”

So while work on winter crops and the second crop predominate the CropSpotters’ agendas, some initial efforts have been started on the 2013-14 crop ahead. Take João Conrado Schmidt, down in Paraná: When he’s not in the field, he says, he and other local producers have been “reading up the literature on the silverleaf whitefly and corn earworm, as those are two pests we are likely to cause some headaches in the next season.“