The Associated Press

WICHITA, Kan. — Kansas farmers are well into their harvest of what is an anticipated to be a record corn crop.

Kansas Corn Growers Association spokeswoman Sue Schulte said Tuesday that corn growers are very optimistic about their yields and their crops.

“By all indications, we will break a record this year,” she said.

Among the pleased farmers is Ken McCauley, of White Cloud in northeast Kansas.

“The corn is excellent — the best ever, really, the best crop we have raised overall,” McCauley said Tuesday.

“We just had perfect weather,” McCauley added. “You are talking about a summer that wasn’t summer.”

This season, McCauley put about 80 percent of his fields into corn and the rest in soybeans.

He said his dryland corn is bringing in 200 bushels an acre from fields that produce 165 bushels in an average year. He has yet to cut his soybeans.

“This is probably one of the good segments of the economy in the country,” he said.

McCauley sold well in advance as much of the anticipated corn crop that he figured he couldn’t store on the farm, but the crop he is cutting now is so large he is now trying to decide what to do with the rest of it.

He mused that $4 a bushel would be a good price for corn today — if farmers hadn’t gotten a taste of $7-a-bushel corn this summer.

“The market told us corn is too high and we are having a reality check,” McCauley said. “I think some of the Wall Street issues are filtering through to the commodity markets.”

Schulte said several factors set the price of corn. The price typically goes down during harvest, but this season the economy may be a factor.

“One of the reasons for the increase in corn prices during the summer was the increase in export demand and that has dropped off a lot,” she said. “That is due to the economic slump we are seeing right now.”