Record-setting corn and wheat harvests worldwide will push prices to levels lower than expected early this year, says a University of Missouri think tank. Although soybean prices will be higher than the think tank’s projections in April, the three crops — accounting for 232 million acres of farmland this year — suggests no more than a minor recovery is likely.
The Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute said this year’s corn crop would fetch an average $3.19 a bushel, wheat $3.74 a bushel and soybeans $9.29 a bushel. Each would be the lowest season-average price paid to farmers in at least 10 years. In its update, FAPRI lowered its estimate of the farm-gate price of corn by 56 cents a bushel and wheat by $1.23 a bushel while raising soybeans by 56 cents a bushel.
Soybean prices are up because of weather damage to crops in Brazil and Argentina, the two major U.S. competitors on the world market, said FAPRI. Corn and wheat prices are expected to improve for the 2017 crop because farmers are expected to curtail plantings of the crops. Instead, they would again plant a record-large amount of soybeans. Despite the slow trend toward higher commodity prices, U.S. averages would be substantially lower than the records set in 2013, at the end of the six-year agricultural boom.