Reviewed August 2026 against USDA’s World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports, USDA Economic Research Service data products, and University of Illinois farmdoc daily.

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Corn Price Per Bushel in the United States: USDA Data and Outlook

As of USDA’s April 9, 2026 WASDE report, the U.S. season-average corn price for the 2025/26 marketing year stood at $4.15 per bushel — up from a record-crop low of $3.90 set in August 2025, but below the $4.30 received for the 2024/25 crop. USDA’s first look at 2026/27, published July 10, 2026, put next season’s price at $4.40 per bushel on a yield estimate of 183.0 bushels per acre. None of those numbers are the “real” price so much as the latest snapshot in a number that USDA revises every month — which is exactly why knowing how to read the revision, not just the headline figure, is the useful skill here.

Corn Price Per Bushel Right Now: USDA’s Season-Average Price

USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) and World Agricultural Outlook Board don’t publish one “2025 corn price” — they publish a season-average farm price for each 12-month marketing year (September 1 to August 31), and that estimate moves every month as the WASDE report is updated with fresh export, yield, and demand data. Here’s how the 2025/26 marketing year actually moved, report by report:

• July 11, 2025 (initial 2025/26 estimate): $4.20 per bushel, down from $4.30 for 2024/25, per the American Farm Bureau Federation’s WASDE summary.
• August 12, 2025: Cut 30 cents to $3.90 after USDA’s first field-based survey found a record 188.8 bushels-per-acre yield and 16.742 billion bushels of production — per DTN Progressive Farmer.
• December 2025: Held at $4.00 as export sales firmed.
• February 2026: Held at $4.10 as USDA raised export demand by 100 million bushels and trimmed ending stocks.
• April 9, 2026 (most recent for the 2025/26 crop): Raised 5 cents to $4.15, per University of Illinois farmdoc’s farm policy news desk.
• Try it: Corn Load Value & Moisture Shrink Calculator

That’s a 40-cent swing on the very same crop, driven almost entirely by one yield surprise. For the new 2026/27 crop, USDA’s July 10, 2026 WASDE opened at $4.40 per bushel on a projected 183.0 bushel-per-acre yield, per RFD-TV’s report coverage. Because WASDE is republished on a set monthly schedule, the single most useful bookmark for “corn prices today” isn’t a news article at all — it’s NASS’s Prices Received chart for corn, updated monthly with the actual price farmers reported, and USDA ERS’s season-average price forecast tool, which recalculates the marketing-year price from current futures on roughly a monthly cycle (last updated July 13, 2026, next update August 13, 2026 as of this review).

How the Marketing Years Compare

Corn Futures and the Crop Insurance “Projected Price”

“Corn futures” and “corn futures price” searches usually land on the Chicago Board of Trade’s (CME Group) December corn contract, the benchmark for new-crop pricing. Rather than quote a single day’s futures print — which is stale within hours — it’s more durable to point to how USDA’s crop insurance program uses that same contract: the Risk Management Agency’s “Projected Price,” which sets the corn revenue-insurance guarantee, is calculated by averaging the December corn futures settlement across every trading day in February. For the 2026 crop, that average came to $4.62 per bushel, down from $4.70 for 2025 and below the 2011–2025 average of $4.76, according to University of Illinois farmdoc daily. The same analysis put 2026’s price volatility factor at 0.15, down from 0.18 in 2025 — the lowest reading in 15 years, meaning insurance premiums priced off less expected price swing for the 2026 crop than in most recent years. Because this is a fixed, once-a-year calculation, it’s a cleaner year-over-year comparison than chasing a live futures quote: check farmdoc daily’s projected-prices post each March for the newly finalized number.

What a Bushel of Corn Actually Is

A “bushel of corn” is not a scoop or a bin size — it’s a fixed unit of trade. Federal and state weights-and-measures rules set the standard trade bushel for shelled corn at 56 pounds, calculated at 15.5% moisture, per Ohio State University’s CFAES Extension. That number never changes with the market — it’s the reason “price bushel corn” can be compared across years and regions at all. What does change is how much any specific truckload of corn is worth, because elevators dock (or “shrink”) wetter corn down to that 56-lb/15.5%-moisture standard before they pay for it.

The shrink formula from that same OSU factsheet is simple: divide (100% minus the standard 15.5% moisture) into (100% minus your corn’s actual moisture), and multiply that ratio against your load’s actual weight to get the standard-moisture-equivalent weight. Divide by 56 to get bushels. A load of corn tested at 18% moisture, for example, is discounted to about 97% of its actual weight before the elevator counts bushels — the wetter the corn, the bigger the discount, and the calculator below runs those exact numbers for any load.

What Moves the Corn Price: Yield, Exports, and Policy

The 40-cent swing documented above wasn’t random — it traced to specific, nameable causes, and the same three levers explain most year-to-year moves in the corn bushel price.

1. Yield Surprises

The single biggest mover in the 2025/26 cycle was the August 2025 WASDE report, which added 7.8 bushels per acre to the yield estimate in one month — from record-large already to a new record at 188.8 bushels per acre, on 1.9 million more harvested acres than expected. That one revision pushed projected 2025/26 ending stocks to 2.1 billion bushels, about 60% above what carried into the prior year, and dropped the season-average price 30 cents. Regional yield variability compounds this: a shortfall concentrated in Iowa or Illinois — the two largest corn-producing states — moves the national number far more than the same shortfall spread thin across smaller producing states.

2. Export Demand and Global Competition

USDA raised 2025/26 corn export projections by 100 million bushels between its December 2025 and February 2026 reports, one of the reasons the price estimate held rather than falling further. Export competitiveness depends on the U.S. dollar’s strength against exporters like Brazil, Ukraine, and Argentina, and on those countries’ own harvest outcomes — a South American drought tightens the world balance sheet and lifts U.S. prices; a bumper Brazilian safrinha crop does the opposite.

3. Farm Program and Insurance Design

Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) payments — the two main farm-bill safety-net programs — are triggered off the same season-average price USDA revises monthly, and the crop insurance revenue guarantee is fixed each February off futures, as described above. Producers who don’t track which of those two price series applies to which decision often misjudge how exposed they actually are to a low-price year.

The United States Urea Market: Corn’s Biggest Input Cost

Corn is the most nitrogen-hungry of the major U.S. row crops, and urea is the most widely used nitrogen source, which is why the United States urea market moves corn economics almost as directly as the corn price itself. Urea’s most recent price spike was sharp and short: DTN’s weekly retail fertilizer survey put the U.S. average urea price at $677 per ton for the week of March 16–20, 2026 (up 11% month-over-month), then $838 per ton for March 30–April 3, 2026 — a 34% jump in two weeks — before it eased back to $720 per ton by June 22–26, 2026 and $714 per ton for the week of July 6–10, 2026, per DTN Progressive Farmer’s April report and its mid-July follow-up. That July price was still 9% above the same week in 2025.

For longer-run context, urea surpassed $1,000 per ton at its 2022 peak, driven by natural-gas cost spikes and trade disruption, and had “somewhat stabilized” at levels well below that peak by early 2025, according to a USDA Economic Research Service chart of note. The 2026 swing shows that “stabilized” doesn’t mean flat: a 34% move in two weeks is well within the range retail urea has shown capable of in a single planting season, and it can shift a corn grower’s breakeven price by real money on a 200-plus-acre farm before a single bushel is sold.

Farmers Market Trends in the United States

Farmers market trends run counter to the record-crop, falling-price story dominating the commodity side of corn. USDA’s National Farmers Market Directory counted 1,755 markets in 1994 and 8,771 by 2019 — nearly a five-fold increase averaging close to 7% annual growth over that 25-year span, according to a USDA Economic Research Service chart of note. But that growth curve bent hard after 2011: annual increases fell below 1% by 2016–2017, and ERS describes the count as having “remained modest and stable” since. ERS attributes the plateau to grocery stores and restaurants absorbing more local-food demand directly, reducing the incentive for new stand-alone markets even as consumer interest in local and traceable food kept rising.

That’s a different kind of market than the commodity corn pit, but the two intersect directly for growers selling sweet corn, popcorn, or specialty grain corn direct to consumers: a market’s viability depends on vendor count and foot traffic, not on the CBOT price board. A grower weighing a farmers-market stall against selling field corn into the commodity system is really weighing a stable-but-slow-growing retail channel against a commodity price that, as shown above, moved 40 cents in nine months.

Data-Driven Tools for Tracking the Corn Market

Between a season-average price that USDA revises monthly, an input market that can swing 34% in two weeks, and a direct-market channel that behaves nothing like either, staying current means combining official data releases with field-level intelligence:

• 🚀 Satellite imagery for tracking crop health, moisture, and regional yield variability before USDA’s survey data catches up (explore Farmonaut Carbon Footprinting to measure farm sustainability and compliance)
• 📱 Mobile apps and web dashboards for cash prices, yield estimates, and input cost tracking (try Farmonaut’s app for field-level insights)
• 🔗 Blockchain traceability for export and supply verification (Farmonaut Traceability)
• 🧑‍🌾 AI-powered advisories for planting and risk-scenario planning, alongside Farmonaut’s Fleet Management platform for logistics and resource optimization
• 📊 USDA’s own primary sources — the monthly WASDE report, NASS’s Prices Received series, and ERS’s season-average price forecast tool — remain the ground truth every other estimate ultimately traces back to.

Implications for Farmers, Producers, and Lenders

A season-average price that moves 40 cents on one yield surprise, and an input cost that moves 34% in two weeks, both demand the same discipline from different market participants:

• Farmers: Re-run breakeven budgets whenever WASDE revises the season-average price or DTN’s fertilizer survey shows a double-digit weekly move, rather than budgeting once at planting and holding that number all season.
• Grain handlers: Track the gap between the standard 56-lb/15.5%-moisture bushel and what’s actually coming off the combine — regional wet-harvest years widen elevator shrink volumes fast.
• Lenders and insurers: Use farm and field data, crop health analytics, and satellite verification (see Farmonaut’s Crop Loan and Insurance tools) to validate lending decisions against real-time conditions rather than last season’s numbers.
• Direct-market sellers: Weigh the farmers-market channel’s slower, steadier growth against commodity price volatility when deciding how much of a crop to route each way.

Farmonaut: Satellite Insights for Corn Market Management

Farmonaut provides a satellite-based platform for agriculture stakeholders who need both macro market context and micro field intelligence for pricing, risk management, and yield decisions.

• 🔍 Real-time monitoring: Track fields and compare against regional trends via multispectral satellite imaging, accessible on the Farmonaut Android, iOS, and web app.
• 📡 AI advisory: Crop-specific recommendations based on weather, soil moisture, and past performance.
• 🔗 Blockchain traceability: Transparent, tamper-proof verification of crop origin and movement for domestic and export certification.
• 🌱 Environmental compliance: Calculate and monitor resource use and emissions (see Farmonaut Carbon Footprinting).
• 💰 Remote loan/insurance validation: Lenders can verify crop condition and history through the Farmonaut Crop Loan and Insurance module.

For advanced users and developers, integrate the Farmonaut API directly, or view the API Developer Docs for weather, yield, and price intelligence.

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