One reason consumers will be seeing higher food prices because of the drought is that much of what farmers grow is to feed the animals.

“We thought we had a fifty percent corn crop. Today, when I came in here, we had a twenty percent corn crop or less,” Allen Entwistle says in spelling out the problems. “The consumer basically looks at the (green, leafy) plant out there and they think that corn ear is there, and it’s not … that steak that costs eight or nine dollars? That’s going to double or triple.”

Entwistle is a corn, soybean, and cattle farmer in Sangamon County and is also president of the Sangamon County Farm Bureau.

“When you look worldwide, our stocks for soybeans are more critical than they are for corn,” says Matt Hughes, who farms corn and soybeans in McLean County and who is also chairman of the Illinois Soybean Association. “Prices are getting good, which means higher prices for commodities – chicken, beef, pork in the stores – but, unfortunately for a lot of my neighbors to the south, when you have lower yields in times of high prices, it’s still a lower revenue.”

IRN, 94.1 FM, WGFA