Nebraska farmer gets firsthand look at China crop progress

Dennis Gengenbach (center) in a corn field in China.

Smithfield, Neb., farmer Dennis Gengenbach returned a week ago today  from China, where he surveyed the corn growing conditions and studied the Chinese government policies that affect acreage, marketing and demand.

Gengenbach, a member of the Nebraska Corn Board, was in China with participants from seven other states on the 2011 U.S. Grains Council Corn Tour.

Those on the tour met with farmers, traders and provincial officials in the northeastern China provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin, both major corn producing areas. "As you talk to the farmers in China, agriculture is their livelihood, just like ours," Gengenbach said in a news release.

Heilongjian and Jilin provinces each produced 866 million bushels (22 million metric tons) of corn in 2010. Roughly half of the harvest was consumed locally. The rest was sold to the southern provinces where there is higher population density and feed consumption.

Chinese corn field, June 2011.

Corn planting acreage for 2011 is expected to increase marginally as farmers experienced good prices in 2010 with increased demand. While some increased corn acres have come from wheat and soybean acreage, there is also increased competition for fruits and vegetables, particularly near urban areas. Some land was unplanted and attributed to increased urban encroachment.

"China continues to balance many contending factors such as modern technology, information technology, increasing mechanization and the aging agricultural labor force. There is a vast exodus of young people to the city. We witnessed land loss due to urbanization," said Floyd Gaibler, the Council's director of trade policy, who accompanied the group.

For more photos of the trip, click here.