New Year

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Partners & Friends,

We are making our way into 2024 after a wonderful holiday season celebrating the birth of our Savior and enjoying time with family and friends. Along with that is a lot of year-end office time and bookkeeping frenzy. We have finalized our corn and soybean seed orders for the next crop season after studying our own field research and consulting with our crop consultants. Our fertilizer needs are mostly booked and applied. The only missing link is our spring side dress NH3 application. We have pre-paid for chemicals and fungicide. When we make our plans, we are preparing for a robust crop with all the inputs needed for top yields. It is encouraging that input costs are mostly lower, except for seed. Commodity prices are certainly lower than year ago. There’ll be some event along the way that will provide marketing opportunities. 

The Hess Family Farm team is putting more tile in the ground whenever the weather allows. Plans are for another 200 acres this year, although the weather forecast does not look good after this week. We have emptied all the corn bins. This is the first time all bins are empty this early, but we took advantage of some early delivery offers that have turned out well. We are now in the midst of year-end bookkeeping tasks, turning out 1099s and W-2s, and preparing for tax filings. There are a few meetings to attend to help with continuing education and business strategy updates.

The current world events are always black swans for our planning. The Middle East conflict is putting energy prices on a roller coaster almost daily. We have booked almost half of our needs for 2024. The situation with the war in Ukraine is jerking commodity prices around daily. Weather in South America is of extreme importance in the midst of their critical growing season. Interest rates are another area we pay constant attention to. Operating interest is almost 2x what rates were 1 year ago.

Our family is doing well. This season of gatherings has shown us just how thankful we are for our friends and family. The support and prayers our family received over the past year of great highs and lows means so much—thank you! We are looking forward to a great New Year with much time for relationships. May you all take time for the ones in your lives.

Fall Prices:

Corn—4.72

Soybeans—11.93

Steve