It's vacation time in the maize silage market. The fear of shortages due to drought has disappeared in the south of the country, while the opposite is likely to happen in the north of the Netherlands. Can the crop tolerate the heavy rains in record amounts?
It is still too early to say that silage maize in the Northern Netherlands will be damaged by the downpours of recent weeks. Moreover, the weather forecast for the coming weeks is less unstable than the weather of the past few weeks.
Cutting maize is doing well
In general, silage maize is doing well throughout the Netherlands. Photos of expanding corn fields, reaching up to 4 meters high, are flooding social media. No trader or seed supplier says out loud that a record harvest is in the making, but the signs point to it. The Wageningen University green monitor shows satellite images that correspond to the peak year of 2014.
However, given these positive yield expectations, the price of silage maize does not yet tend to rise.
Livestock influence?
In addition, the livestock population has shrunk, although the latest milk supply figures show that milk production is barely lower than last year. Recently, considerably more milk has been milked per cow. The persistently rising milk price in particular is driving up production per cow. As a result, the demand for silage maize tends to increase.
This while the area of silage maize is decreasing year on year, although this year (compared to last year) it is only a few thousand hectares less. If there were not such a beautiful crop in the field, the price of silage maize would certainly also tend to rise.
Unchanged price
All in all, these market developments mean that the price of silage maize remains stable. In the south, the upper limit is €65 per tonne delivered free to the farm, depending on quality and transport distance. The lower limit is €56 per tonne for high-quality maize.
Poorer quality lots are also offered on Marktplaats, from 2015, for a lower amount per tonne. The soil and crop laboratory Eurofins recently pointed out to what extent the quality of silage maize is deteriorating and may deviate from the official nutritional value analysis. This especially as time passes.