“This year, Australia had a terrible drought, and their wheat production is down by 75 percent,” Hanson said. “They’re one of the countries in the world that feed wheat to their animals. They’re not going to have that wheat available now, so they are going to switch to corn.
“And people that used to buy exports of wheat from Australia to feed their animals are now going to scramble to find other supplies to feed, and they’re going to be looking for corn as well.”
Further increasing the market value of corn, Hanson said, are the nation’s lower corn production for 2006 and the national push for more biofuel usage of corn.
“There’s been a lot of talk recently about being secure in our own fuel supply, so Congress has put quite a few dollars into encouraging ethanol production,” Hanson said. “We’re going to see more and more demand on corn, which is going to increase the price.”
Hanson also predicts that U.S. producers will be planting more corn in 2007 to take advantage of the high market value, which will remove more soybean acreage from production. Soybeans are another major ingredient in catfish feed.
Source: Delta Farm Press