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With trade tensions and tight margins, Missouri farmer banks on grain bags

A farmer in central Missouri says he’s optimistic an investment in grain bagging equipment will pay off as he stores corn and soybeans this fall.

“Right or wrong: this year I wasn’t going to give this crop away.”

Nathan Alpers in Cooper County says last year’s good crops were sold to the elevator during harvest. But this year “if you can hold onto it and sell it later on in the spring, there’s 80 cents to $1 carry in the market. We are bagging what’s in our grain bins and making room.”

Alpers says it was too expensive to build a new grain bin. He also says there’s too much uncertainty with the ongoing trade war, and farmers need more stability in the markets and input costs.

“We didn’t want to spend the money on the bagger, but we figured it was the best thing we could do, because, the extra 80 cents might be a make-or-break for us later on, if we could hold on. We’ve already sold some to capture that and didn’t want to lose it.”

He says on-farm grain bag storage is still relatively new in Cooper County.  

Rain has delayed some corn and soybean harvest in central Missouri, but Alpers tells Brownfield he plans to resume corn harvest once fields dry this week.