Category: Cash Crop
By: Barbara Wildegger
US corn production – how does it compare from a global perspective?
US corn production is competitive
How competitive is US corn production? - More than 800 crop and livestock producers from across North America listened to Yelto Zimmer´s key note speech at the DTN/The Progressive Farmer Ag Summit in Chicago in December 2014.
The Ag Summit is organised by DTN/The Progressive Farmer, a leading global agricultural information service provider in the US every year. The aim of this conference is to bring farmers, industry thought-leaders and analysts together for knowledge sharing and sessions that provide forward-thinking crop and livestock producers with strategies for success in the coming year.
Yelto Zimmer (coordinator of the agri benchmark Cash Crop Network) talks about how corn led to on-farm profits for the world's leading grain and soybean producers. agri benchmark data from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, France, Poland, UK, Canada, Australia and US is used to analyse and compare the most important corn producing states in the US (Iowa, Kansas, Indiana and North Dakota).
Four aspects matter in international competitiveness in ag commodities:
- cost of production at farm level
- domestic transport & logistics cost
- overseas transport cost – distance to import destination and
- exchange rates
There are three major advantages of the US grain production system:
- The US is strong in efficiency of direct input uses like fertilizer.
- The strength of the US (and Canadian) farms are their low operating costs (machinery and labour). Only the Argentinian farm can compete with the US farm in direct and operating cost.
- And the US as a whole has a very good transport and logistics system (more information on our
website). Its efficient domestic transport system puts the US in a very competitive position – especially compared to Argentina and Brazil, where the transport distance is approximately the same but the costs are much higher. What really matters is the quality of infrastructure – not pure distance.
US grain production - how does it compare from a global perspective
(pdf-document, 1.974 kb)
Interview Yelto Zimmer at the Ag Summit
(video)