The dead of winter invariably breeds restlessness along with an urge to look ahead and make plans for spring and summer, a mindset that surely applies to farmers and everyone else. But on the question of marketing grain for next fall’s harvest, the profitable move may be to stay warm and sit tight.
Row crop farmers coming off a difficult 2025 are looking at similar drivers in 2026: low commodity prices, high input costs and tight margins. Yet, Matt Bennett, CEO of AgMarket.Net, noted at a recent conference that many things remain in flux. He recommends patience, noting farmers retain a key ally in strong corn demand.
“When it comes to a marketing plan, we're still nine months away from harvest,” Bennett said in an interview with Farm Futures at his firm’s annual “Farming for Profit, Not Price” conference in Nashville. “Do I want to lock in a loss? Probably not. I want to kind of wait and see how this thing plays out.”
Drought or other weather problems could always pop up — say, with Brazil’s second corn crop, known as the safrinha, Bennett noted. Additionally, global corn stockpiles are forecast to shrink 1.3% in 2026 to an 11-year low, even in the wake of a record 17-billion-bushel U.S. crop.
“We have to keep in mind that world stocks are going to actually constrict, which is interesting because the U.S. had the largest corn crop we've ever had by a landslide,” Bennett said. “So that means that with corn worldwide, we're using more than what we're growing.”
If a weather problem develops in South America, the U.S. or another growing region, “we should get volatility into this market and at least get an opportunity to maybe market or manage some risk above breakeven,” Bennett said. “That's my hope right now. But the verdict is still out. It's a tenuous situation, but I don't feel this far away from harvest we need to get aggressive if we can't make money.”
U.S. “exporting the daylights” out of corn
The U.S. acreage mix this spring for corn and soybeans looms as another major question, Bennett said.
Following “outlier” years, such as 2025, when corn plantings hit a nine-decade high, acreage would typically pull back by at least 3 million to 4 million acres. Bennett believes corn seedings will decline somewhat but still remain historically high, in a range of 95 million to 96 million acres.
Plantings under 95 million acres could be “somewhat a friendly number” for corn prices, Bennett said. “The reason is because you've got record world and U.S. demand. If demand is as strong as USDA has suggested, if you pull 4 million or 5 million acres out of the mix, it's going to have a pretty big impact on the importance of ideal weather this year.”
Adjusted for inflation, corn “is pretty cheap, and right now we're the cheapest corn in the world, and we continue to export the daylights out of it,” Bennett added.
“Demand's not going away,” compelling farmers to produce large crops every year, he said. “At some point, Mother Nature is going to get her nose out of joint. When that happens, I do think that you'll see a significant amount of volatility enter the market.”
To hear directly from Bennett, watch this Ag Marketing IQ video.