2019 Spring Farm Outlook

Page 18 2019 Logan County Farm Outlook Magazine Lincoln Daily News March 21, 2019 is the first time in his career he has seen contracts rewritten because of a sudden increase in anhydrous ammonia prices. “The price is much higher,” said Harms. “It’s really controlled by the manufacturers and the pipeline. Something happened this year I’ve never seen happen before. Our contracts were cancelled and new contracts were written in January that were significantly higher. I’ve never seen that in my tenure.” Harms has 20 years experience in the fertilizer business. “We’ve always had contracts that they’ve added storage to when we couldn’t get the anhydrous on, but this is the first time that, I believe, it’s ever happened where they actually cancelled them and have rewritten them,” said Harms. How much has the price of anhydrous risen? “Considerably,” answered Harms. “For anhydrous ammonia retail it probably went up about $120 to $150 a ton from December 31st to January 1st, overnight,” Harms emphasized. “I am sure, in defense of the manufacturers, some of this is due to they are going to have a tough Spring getting things aligned in the pipeline and getting things stored in the proper locations for transports, so there’s a lot of logistics that go into the spring that normally isn’t there. It’s going to be a mad dash to the finish line.” So that means when the weather finally turns nice enough to plant, farmers will want their nitrogen applied and plant corn at the same time. For Herrin Fertilizer, Inc. that means there won’t be enough hours in the day to cover their workload, but somehow they will get the job done. They always do. “Basically corn gets planted in our area, I am guessing in about 10 days, so you’re going to have to get these nitrogen products on in front of this. Everything is gonna happen very fast or attempt to happen very fast, I should say,” said Harms. “Fortunately, there is different forms of nitrogen. We sell a lot of five percent nitrogen solution. We sell 28 percent nitrogen solution. So some of this pressure on anhydrous will go to these markets. We are in a pretty good position to do liquids. The price on the five percent probably has not gone up as drastically as what anhydrous and 28 percent solution has Continue 8