6-12 IAN What to Plant

 Talking with farmer and bean seed salesman John Dean about what drives farmers to plant what they plant.“We’ve had a number of years where corn prices and the other commodity prices were so high and it all got set off when the ethanol subsidy was put in place and there was such a push for ethanol production and that translated into corn acres and corn prices soared and as far as I know it caused all commodity prices to take a big jump. That was because demand for corn went way up because of the increased use of ethanol as well as the traditional uses for feed and food. But that had a big impact on the other commodity acreages, acres were switched from say soybeans and sunflowers and dry beans, those acres were switched into corn because the corn price jumped in the other prices lagged. You know how that works. Everybody rushes to where the high price is, that’s where the money is. Another thing that factored into a jump in acres, I am more familiar with dried beans but there was quite a drought in Texas and Mexico last year and Mexico planted substantially fewer acres of beings than they normally do because of the drought and so that has helped drive the bean prices up this year