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Menu Data Resources About Contact Scale: farming’s false prophet August 28, 2018 ~ Value Farmer Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article on the threat of farmers to Cargill and ADM . In many ways this is laughable. These grain merchants scale so far out weighs their customers (the farmers) that there is no foreseeable future in which they will come under threat. This kind of scale is salivated over in boardrooms across the country. Row crop agriculture is in many ways the addressable market (
First, let’s justify the laughable comment above. Archer Daniels Midland handled 22.7 million metric tons of corn and 34.7 million metric tons of oilseeds. So, that is about 894 million bushels of corn and 638 million bushels of soybeans (if half of the oilseeds are soybeans).
Now let’s look at production. A decent guess at total row crop acres in the United States would be 400 million. The largest grower of commodity crops in the United States is 200,000 acres. There are a few others who are around 100,000 acres. For argument’s sake let’s assume the top growers amount to 1,000,000 acres. If these growers produce 50% corn and 50% soybeans at the national average of 178.4 bushels of corn and 51.6 bushels of soybeans , then they produce 89 million bushels of corn total and 25.8 mil
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