Corn Futures Trading At Multi-Year Highs

Farmers have been watching corn prices soar.

Jonathon Driedger is a vice-president with LeftField Commodity Research.

"Corn prices are maybe not quite as dramatic as canola, but certainly, we have a futures market that's trading at multi-year highs and cash bids here in our own backyard at similar lofty levels. It's really at a pretty dramatic runup here, if we think back to say last summer/early fall when ideas were that first of all the U.S. crop would be bigger than it turned out to be, so supplies were a little smaller. We've also had surprisingly good demand," said Driedger. "Over the course of the winter, we've had this steady tightening of the U.S. balance sheet to point where the ending stocks and carry-out for the current crop year, it's going to be the tightest in about seven or eight years at least and still shrinking further... Really the corn market has just been responding to this steady tightening, not just in the U.S., but globally, and really that's what's been driving this market higher, not just on U.S. futures but even in our own backyard here."

The USDA is releasing its May WASDE report Wednesday.