High Feed Costs

I had a chat with the Idaho Barley commission's executive director, Kelly Olson. "Feed barley prices continue to fall, rain damages malting barley crop. What is the state of Idaho's barley crop? We were the lead of that crop deterioration. We started seeing persistent rain in early August. It rained for a good solid three weeks so a very large percent of our malt barley did get downgraded to feed barley. We are still sorting that out. There is some malt barley that has gone into storage hoping to work through it and perhaps some of it will get accepted as malt barley that a very large percentage, upwards of 60% of the crop has been lost to malting. With that unexpected volume moving into feed channels, the feed prices have fallen. Plus, in feed markets you compete with corn and we are on the cusp of a 14 1/2 billion bushel corn crop so there is a huge supply of feed grains out there. And wheat was rained on and a lot of that milling quality has gone to eat wheat so what we are seeing is just an unexpectedly large volume of the grain and prices have been on the down slide. Does this mean that the specialty breweries are going to suffer? Their malt prices are going to be higher and there could be some availability problems because we weren't the only area. Montana had rain, North Dakota had rain.