If you have some sweet corn in your garden patch, don’t consider eating it. Try to deliver it on the Chicago Board of Trade where field corn prices are coming close to record levels of more than $5 a bushel once again.
Faced with the tightest supply situation in close to 50 years, users and big grain firms have scoured the countryside to find every last bushel of corn. That includes the CBOT, where futures normally are used as a pricing mechanism and little actual grain changes hand.
That could be different next month when the July contract expires. The volatility was on display Friday after the Agriculture Department reported the amount of corn in storage was 200 million bushels below what trade analysts had estimated.
July futures shot up by 34 3/4 cents a bushel to $5.16 1/2, the biggest one-day CBOT corn price increase in 23 years, and within hailing distance of the exchange record price of $5.36 set on May 21.
Meanwhile, it is never too early to worry about hot weather threatening to stunt the growth of the new crop, which even under perfect conditions likely won’t be large enough to rebuild the nation’s supply very much.
