Canola plant spurs interest for South Carolina growers
Located just across Lake Hartwell from some of South Carolina’s most productive farm land, the company took an interesting path, one that covered two continents, to provide a new cropping opportunity for farmers in South Carolina and across the Southeast.
They are well along in providing a good, sustainable winter crop for grain growers in northeast Georgia and throughout South Carolina
From the farmer’s perspective in the Southeast, canola is likely to produce about 80 percent of a wheat crop. Most Southeast growers shoot for an 80 bushel per acre wheat yield and grown on the same land with the same good production practices they would likely produce about 60 (50 pounds per bushel) bushels of canola per acre.
However, the canola is likely to be 70-80 percent more valuable than wheat — in most years, says Robert Davis, co-owner and president of AgStrong. At the end of the day, the grower should net $100-$150 more per acre with canola.
“We have had growers ask us about growing more canola, which would require a shorter rotation, and we say no. To be sustainable, growers must grow canola the right way and everything we know about growing the crop indicates in the Southeast a three-year rotation is a must,” Davis says.
Even so, the outside markets provided a mixed message for traders in the grain and oilseed pits, leading to mixed trade for the grains in a sluggish trading session. Cotton prices surged to new post-Civil War highs again today, even amid reports that
Cargill Inc., the grain distributor that's the largest closely held company in the US, opposes France's proposal to require deposits equal to part of the value of a trade because it would probably increase working-capital requirements, Roger Janson,
Further, the soybean crop in Brazil is in good shape and could reach a record production level, which should support oilseed processing volumes. We're expecting to bump up our estimates for agribusiness in 2011, which should offset the weaker