I counted 4 unit grain trains rolling through town in the last 24 hours. Someone must be eating a lot of corn flakes![:)]
Interesting, most of it here is either still in the field or piled on the ground here.
Anyone know what the price of corn is right now??
Randy
About $1.60 bushel
ed
$1.60?? where are you gettin that price?? lemme know lol. here in north central IL, there isn’t much grain moving at all. we’re about 5 miles from the Illinois River so all of ours goes on the barge…if they can find barges that is. i’ve never seen so much corn piled up.
Here we get many, many grain trains. Maybe between 5 and 10 a day. The season is ending here, it has already become the Great White North a couple times!
Matthew
That’s interesting! I was under the impression that this year’s corn crop was not a good one due to the shortage of rainfall in the midwest.[%-)]
I know that in my area of Illinois, there are huge mountains of corn piled up waiting for storage/transport. Didn’t central Illinois farmers ask for federal relief because of the drought that plagued the corn belt?
They had a little problem with the weather down at the port of New Orleans.
http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/fall_05/article2.aspx
Canadian Pacific runs about 5 to 10 grain trains a day through Calgary. On the way to Vancouver, they have 2 or 3 AC 4400 horsepower at the front point , usually with a AC 4400 at the back point to help it get through the Rockies. [8D]
…Lots of covered hoppers pass through Muncie on NS from the west each Fall…and this one was no exception.
Fall is the Harvest Season and the peak time for grain movements…both to market and to storage.
Grain: Way up here in Southern Canada, grain is wheat, or barley, I think in the U.S. corn is grain, just what do you do with all that corn?? $1.60/bu ???now go see what a box of corn flakes cost ! !
Another reason that ethanol plants are all the rage in farm states, I guess
It looks like the corn prices are near $1.50 range.
I was with my brother in law yesterday for Thanksgiving. He farms about 1500 acres in northern Indiana and stores most of his corn for better prices after the first of the year. There is a pretty big co-op less than five miles from his house that sends 65 car grain trains to North Carolina.
He is an interesting guy to talk to, not only farming, but he is also a railfan.
It was interesting talking to him about the economics of farming and grain pricing. There is an ethanol plant nearby (South Bend) but he sells his corn locally based on the spread pricing between the two.
It was another great corn crop, at least in northern Indiana, with some yields up to 200 bushels per acre.
I dont know what happened in Northern Illinois…they really had a tough summer with little rain.
ed