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Derecho aftermath will affect propane demand for grain drying
It remains to be seen what impact the recent derecho will have on fall grain drying demand. It will be a while before it’s determined how and if damaged corn acres can be harvested, according to Mike Newland, director of agriculture business development at the Propane Education and Research Council (PERC).
“We’re just trying to determine how many go to silage, how many acres try to get saved for grain and then what does that grain look like and how much propane it’s going to need,” Newland told Brownfield Ag News, “so we’ve got a lot of variables, a lot of pieces that are moving.”
PERC has developed online modeling tools to help determine how much propane will be needed to fuel grain driers, said Newland, but wind damaged acres will skew the demand scenario.
“The plants are going to be stacked on top of each other in the field, which means they won’t have normal airflow around them,” said Newland, “so I think the opportunity for the bushels that do get harvested in some of those areas to be super wet and incredibly wet and will probably use some additional propane.”
Logistical problems in late 2019, in some cases, resulted in propane supplies not getting to where they needed to be, when they needed to be, according to Newland. That was compounded by an early cold snap.
“Not only were we pulling more gallons in a shorter period of time to the grain dryer tanks,” he said, “we were also starting to pull it to all the livestock buildings and all the houses around the country to try to heat those buildings and birds and pigs and people.”
PERC’s grain drying calculator and other predictive modeling tools will help the industry avoid such logistically created supply issues in the future, said Newland.
