By Nick Paulson and Gary Schnitkey
October settlement prices of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) futures contracts are used to set harvest prices on Federal crop insurance products for corn and soybeans in the Midwest. Harvest prices are $4.75 per bushel for corn and $12.63 per bushel for soybeans. Both are above their projected prices, which are $4.62 for corn and $11.09 for soybeans.
Because the harvest price is above the projected price for both crops, yield losses will be required to trigger payments under individual and area policies, including Supplemental Coverage Option (SCO) and Enhanced Coverage Option (SCO). Revenue Protection (RP) sets its guarantee at the higher of the projected or harvest price. As a result, RP will make higher insurance payments than Revenue Protection with the Harvest Price Exclusion (RP-HPE), which does not have the guarantee increase provision. Yield Protection (YP) will value covered yield losses at the projected price.
Corn
The 2026 harvest price for corn is $4.75, the average of the December 2026 CME corn futures contract during October. Figure 1 shows daily settlement prices during October and how the average of the settlement prices changed throughout the month. The December 2026 corn contract started October with settlement prices near $5 per bushel but then declined to around $4.50 by the end of the month. The average of the settlement prices declined to the final harvest price of $4.75 by the end of the month.
The $4.75 harvest price is $0.13, or 2.8%, above the 2026 projected price for corn of $4.62. As shown in Figure 2, the harvest price for corn was below the projected price in each of the last three years from 2023 to 2025. Corn’s harvest price exceeded the projected price was during the three consecutive crop years from 2020 through 2022. Over the last 10 years, from 2017 to 2026, the average difference between the harvest and projected prices for corn has been -$0.09 per bushel.
Source : illinois.edu