Throughout the years, he has become familiar with the ups and downs of not only the market, but the quality of the crop -- particularly corn, for the last 20 years.
"Well, this goes back a good many years when we were just farming milo, soybeans and some wheat," Jones said. "Of course, then the corn price was the determining factor and the value of the corn crop. I thought it was more attractive than milo, so we went to switching."
Even though his father, Bill, who is now 84, retired approximately 20 years ago, he still has a part in the daily life of the farm.
"I kind of got started with this when he retired, and that has been 20 something years ago," Jones said. "But yes, he has been here every day, and he has done everything with us. As far as the farming part of it, I am probably more responsible for getting us into all that, but he is here every day. We do have a Charolais cattle herd and that has been the main stay of everything we have done."
While the price of corn has gone up and down through the years, Jones is sticking by his decision to be a corn producer.
"We started about 1991 or 1992. It is just up and down following the Chicago Board of Trade, but the price of milo versus the price of corn back in 1991 or 1992, the corn was more attractive per bushel than the milo was," he explained. "So, that was why we got over and started with corn, and then after we got used to it, we liked it a little better. They have both got their place, but right now most of mine is corn. We had some milo last year, but we don't have any this year."
Jones had planned on planting close to 1,000 acres of corn this year, but the weather hindered his plans, leaving him with 660 acres.
"It was wet and we just didn't get all of it planted that we wanted to plant," Jones said. "(The rain) definitely impacted them this year. Everything that was plowed last fall that was reasonably ready, we went to planting most of it in corn to start with."
What didn't get planted in corn was devoted to soybeans.
Economically, still Jones doesn't know what kind of impact the wet weather will ultimately have on his crop.
"That is hard to tell yet," he said. "Of course, it was very, very wet all winter and coming into spring, then when it quit raining and dried up, we got a good bit of it planted, and then it didn't rain anymore or very little -- from one extreme to another extreme. These last few rains here, which is probably a little late to help most of the corn, or help them very much, it did help some, but it came a little late. Now the soybeans, some of these rains here are really going to help them, especially your later beans."
The weather will always be the biggest factor and challenge for Jones when planting and harvesting his corn crop.
"It was very, very wet in the springtime," Jones said. "Trying to be patient enough to get your ground dried out and get it in shape and get it planted in a timely manner -- I would say we were a good 10 days later than what I would like. We kind of quit planting corn about the first week of April... We are always through planting corn at the end of March. That may not sound like a lot, and it might have worked this year, to just keep planting it.
"By the time we got some of the ground work and what we call 'in shape' to plant ,it needed to rain on it to come up and it wasn't going to come up till it rained," he continued. "I finally made the decision 'this is late enough to plant a corn crop.' Don't get me wrong there were people that were planting corn all the way until April 15 and it all looks like it is going to work out just fine to me. With these later rains right here, it may be even better, but I didn't know that when I had to decide."
Jones hopes that the historically dry, hot Texas months of July and August will come through to make the harvest as timely as possible.
"We don't know what the weather will be when we go to harvesting, but normally it is pretty hot and dry," Jones said. "Of course, when we start harvesting this corn it is usually a pretty dry time of the year. We can't predict what the weather is going to do there, but normally we got the kind of weather that we need to harvest, especially corn. It will come on in to the later part of July, the very first part of August. Normally that is a perfect time of a year for harvesting. We may be a week behind what is normal. That is about what we were on planting."
Jones will use some of his crop to put into the feed for their own stock of Charolais cattle and sell the rest mainly through feed mills for animal feed. They also grow soybeans, wheat and sometimes milo on their acreage near Paris.
