Soybeans are making a run at corn — on the national level, anyway — for the total number of acres planted.
American farmers in the 2014 planting season rang up record numbers when they increasingly put their money on soybeans instead of corn, investing millions of acres for the former over the latter. Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently noted that 84.8 million acres of soybeans were planted, which is almost 11 percent more than last year’s sowing. Top states were Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, and New York. At 91.6 million acres nationwide, corn-planting was down almost four percent from the country’s 2013 levels.
The Washington soybean industry is concentrated in the Walla Walla area in southeastern Washington, and it owes its existence primarily for the oil — more specifically, the biofuel — that the crop produces. Canola and sunflower are emerging as alternatives to soybean oil.
But the state of Washington’s crop-production of field corn and sweet corn is not in imminent danger of being surpassed by soybean production. Perry Beale is the Crop Mapping Coordinator with the Natural Resources Assessment Section in the Director’s Office of the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Beale pointed out that field corn (for four-legged animals) and sweet corn (for us two-legged animals) represent a far more significant share of the Washington harvest. Field corn is grown for silage or grain. Silage is a stored fodder for cud-chewing animals, such as cattle and sheep. Grain is a major crop for feed or ethanol.
Beale said state-agriculture folks won’t know specific details about this year’s harvest until the Washington harvest season in a few months. The Washington Department of Agriculture’s 2013 planting-data show 204,195 acres of field corn, 64,141 acres of sweet corn, and 241 acres of soybeans.