Corn Futures Trading At Multi-Year Highs

May 12, 2021

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.

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.