Crop Prospects for 2026
This seems to be the time of year when there’s a flood of reports looking back at the past year or gazing ahead to the new year. While looking backward allows a person to gauge their grain marketing performance, hindsight generally doesn’t provide much help for making decisions about the upcoming year.
In fact, every marketing year is different. Making next year’s decisions based on last year’s successes or failures can be counterproductive. After all, acreage will shift and while there are always hopes for big yields, the odds of record output happening again in 2026 are very unlikely. In addition, global trade will also change (hopefully for the better) and affect next year’s market prospects.
This is also the time of year when we start thinking about farmers’ planting decisions for next spring. There are many factors going into those decisions, especially crop rotation considerations, but prices and profitability are also important. Typically, we use basic production costs and new-crop bids to compare gross margins for a number of crops. Of course, each farm’s farming practices and cost structure are different, so we use a set of generic production costs.
Often, new-crop bids are available for most crops by now, but this year’s heavy supplies seem to be decreasing buyers’ urgency for contracting tonnage for 2026/27, especially for special crops. This means we need to use our best “judgement” of where new-crop bids could show up.
This gross margin analysis isn’t the be-all and end-all of our acreage guesstimates though. We also spend time talking to people on the front lines to get farmer feedback and a few themes seem to be emerging for 2026. First, maintaining crop rotations is the most important driver and will limit the size of shifts in and out of various crops. At the same time though, on-farm inventories of some crops are much larger than others and could discourage acres of the “heaviest crops”.
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