For the next few years, season-average prices for U.S. corn, soybeans, and wheat, the three most widely grown crops in the country, will largely mirror the market prices for this year’s crops, projected the Agriculture Department on Thursday. The steep declines in farm-gate prices since 2022 would be replaced by a period of relative stability, according to the USDA’s long-term baseline.
Over the next five years, corn would sell for an average of $4.10 a bushel, the same as the USDA’s estimated farm-gate price for this year’s crop. Wheat prices, slowly rising from the $5.70 forecast for this year’s crop, would average $5.92 a bushel over five years. Soybean prices would drop to $10 a bushel for the 2025 crop and sell for an average of $10.09 through 2029/30. This year’s crop was estimated to average $10.80 a bushel.
Commodity prices have been declining since 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a spike in prices that were already surging because of China’s return as a U.S. customer after the Sino-U.S. trade war. Lower commodity prices and higher production costs combined to knock farm income down sharply from the record levels of 2022.
In constructing its projections, the USDA assumed U.S. economic growth of 2.1 percent in 2025, a slightly lower rate than this year. Inflation, interest rates, and crude oil prices would be lower, while personal income would rise. The global economy would grow by 2.8 percent, with the strongest gains in Asia and Africa.
U.S. farmers would plant more land to corn and less to soybeans in 2025, reflecting the expected decline in soybean prices, projected the USDA. Plantings of the other major field crops would change little. The USDA projected corn plantings of 91 million acres, an increase of 1.3 million acres from this year, and soybean plantings of 85 million acres, a drop of 2.1 million acres.
With normal weather and trend-line yields, growers would harvest 15.3 billion bushels of corn and 4.42 billion bushels of soybeans in 2025, said the USDA. Those would be the second-largest corn and the third-largest soybean crops on record. The 2025 wheat crop was projected at 1.88 billion bushels, down 4 percent from this year, on lower yields per acre and a small reduction in plantings.
So-called eight-crop plantings — corn, soybeans, wheat, upland cotton, rice, sorghum, barley, and oats — would total 246.9 million acres in 2025, a decline of 900,000 acres from this year. In 2023, when commodity prices were high, eight-crop plantings totaled 253.7 million acres.