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Corn flexes its muscles in acres battleCorn flexes its muscles in acres battle

Price ratio suggests sizable shift to corn this spring.

Bruce Blythe, Senior Editor, Commodities

February 4, 2025

1 Min Read
Corn planter planting field in spring
Getty Images/ArtistGNDphotography

It’s still early in the 2025 battle for acres, but recent market patterns suggest corn is muscling ahead of soybeans and other crops.

The soybean-to-corn price ratio, a gauge of U.S. planting intentions, was trading slightly above 2, near two-year lows, in early 2025. The lower the ratio, the stronger corn prices are relative to soybeans, and a move below 2.4 historically signals an acreage shift from soybeans to corn, says Tanner Ehmke, grain economist at CoBank.

Soybean to corn ratio for 2024

But a shift from soybeans could become more of a stampede. As grain markets languished much of the past year, corn was a relative outperformer, buoyed by robust export demand. Soybeans, by contrast, plunged 23% in 2024 and remain near four-year lows.

USDA predicted increased corn acres in 2025 but may need to revise higher. In its annual outlook released in November, the agency forecast 2025 U.S. corn plantings at 92 million acres, up 1.4% from 90.7 million in 2024.

In early 2024, when prices favored soybeans, plantings jumped 4.2% from 2023. A similar rise in corn this year could push seedings above 94.5 million acres, near the 10-year high of 94.6 million in 2023. Ehmke believes corn could surpass 94 million acres “if current trends persist.”

It will be a couple months before planters roll across the Midwest, and other factors such as weather could influence the acreage mix. But if corn acres do rise sharply, supplies would likely increase in turn, setting the market up for a potential price-depressive glut, similar to what’s happening with soybeans.

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About the Author

Bruce Blythe

Senior Editor, Commodities, Farm Futures

Bruce Blythe is a senior editor at Farm Futures. He has covered commodity markets, agribusiness and the farm economy for Bloomberg, Dow Jones Newswires, Reuters and Farm Journal Media's Pro Farmer. He got his start in ag news as a wire service reporter writing about the livestock and grain futures markets from the trading floors of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade.

Blythe also worked as an assistant managing editor at Crain’s Chicago Business and, most recently, as a financial writer and editor for Charles Schwab's Insights & Education editorial team. 

He grew up on his family’s grain and livestock farm outside Williamsburg, Iowa, and holds a degree in agricultural journalism from Iowa State University. He lives in Elmhurst, Ill., with his family.

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