New crops are, well, cropping up everywhere. In fact, Farm Journal Media reports that a significant amount of new corn acres are popping up well outside the corn belt. Farm Journal says its latest campaign to collect data on new crop acres is unprecedented. The agricultural media company says this data collection campaign will serve as a vital tool for advertisers for the 2007 fall selling season.
“We began picking up a lot of crop comments from users on AgWeb following the 2006 harvest and then started seeing the shift when we began collecting 2007 acreage data,” according to Steve Custer, Executive Vice President, publisher of FARM JOURNAL and TOP PRODUCER magazines and who also oversees the company’s Database Strategies division and circulation efforts.
In early March, Farm Journal decided to speed up their data collection simply because of the huge shift that was going to occur this year. Custer reports they expanded the Webster City staff by 50% and extended the call center’s daily hours to meet the goal of making over 400,000 grower calls by the end of August. “We have over half of large growers already updated with 2007 acres so we’re seeing the trends long before USDA reports them,” Custer says.
The findings from Farm Journal’s data collection efforts through the spring absolutely mirrored those USDA reported in the June 29th “Acreage Report”. “Corn acres are growing everywhere,” Custer reports. “In fact, a lot of the new acres are coming from far outside the corn belt. The Delta and the southeast are seeing not only huge percentage growth, but some states in those areas are in the top states nationally in terms of the sheer number of new corn acres.”
Cotton growers, in particular, made a big move to corn. Cotton acres are down 28% in 2007, with a majority of those acres being shifted to corn according to what Farm Journal is finding. “We’re finding cotton growers, at an individual grower level, shifting the most. They are shifting more than double the acreage to corn as are soybean growers, for example,” observes Allen Moczygemba, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Database Strategies at Farm Journal. “Cotton growers also are the most likely to be ‘new to corn’ in 2007, many not having grown this crop in recent years.”
So far, Farm Journal has found more than 4,000 new corn growers in total who account for over 1 million new corn acres, according to Moczygemba. “These are individuals who were not growing corn in the last 3 years and who will be completely missed by other publications for the 2007-2008 growing season.”
Andy Weber, President/CEO of Farm Journal Media points out the enormous business opportunities this historic shift presents. “Perhaps at no other time in agriculture’s history has there been a change creating such opportunity for agri-marketers to capture market share. But if you’re relying on data collected prior to 2007, you won’t be targeting the full potential this year presents. It’s that simple.”