Corn Breaks Records and Markets

This Week In Ag #149

Congratulations, American corn growers! You just set a new production record. And you didn’t just break the record. You smashed it!

We’re talking Tom Brady meets Michael Phelps style of record crushing. US corn growers topped the 17-billion-bushel mark – the previous record was 15.3 billion bushels produced in 2023 – by averaging over 180 bu/A for the first time ever.

How will you celebrate? Probably not by going to Disneyland. The fruits of these labors plummeted the corn market by 6% and figures to make corn production and marketing for 2026 even more challenging.

Last week, USDA raised the average corn crop to a record 186.5 bushels per acre. That’s about a half-bushel per acre higher than expected. When you combine that with 98.8 million planted acres – the most since the Dust Bowl era – you accumulate 17.02 billion bushels on 91.3 million acres of harvested grain.

So how much is 17 billion bushels? That’s 952 billion pounds. If you filled semi-trailers full of the 2025 US corn crop and lined them up, they’d circle the earth more than five times.

That’s some mega maize. So, what does one do with all of it?

The good news is, overall demand for #2 dent corn (the official name for field corn produced for grain) has never been higher. It’s projected to grow by 8%, or 1.2 billion bushels, over last year. And while most of the corn grown across the fruited plain stays in the United States, anywhere from 80-90%, US corn exports are projected to grow 12% in 2026. Corn usage for the upcoming year is now projected at 16.4 billion bushels.

Still, there’s a big gap between supply and demand. And with corn being our nation’s most widely grown crop – and the biggest driver of fertilizer, crop protection and equipment sales – where it all goes will dictate where the farm economy goes.