OPINION: Bin buster vs. lackluster
Corn bin buster in U.S., lower yields in Ontario but good news is we have just enough to supply Canadian end users and there’s a sweet price point to be had
The dominant headline news story in grain markets through the 2025 growing season has been about how big of corn harvest American farmers have expected to bring in this year.
Projections have not only been for a massive harvest, (currently pegged at 16.8 billion bushels, up 12 % from 2024), but also a substantial rise in ending stocks, (potentially up as much as 2.1 billion bushels) because the growth in U.S. corn production is out running any increase in demand. While at first glance this information would sound problematic for corn prices for Ontario producers, upon closer analysis, it would appear that our domestic corn market will largely insulate this province’s corn growers from the U.S. supply glut.
Ontario has a very robust corn market. There are 6 ethanol plants, 3 corn wet millers, and a 6 million tonne feed market all built around a 2.25 million acre corn crop. In years like 2024 where Ontario reached a record average corn yield of 204 bu/ac, (5.18 tonnes per acre), the fact that Ontario’s corn production region is surrounded by 8 bulk vessel loading terminals on the Great Lakes, the surplus corn was simply skimmed off and shipped out into global export markets in an extremely efficient and cost effective way. Ontario corn growers should have an enormous amount of confidence in the market’s demand for the crop which they produce when they look back at last year’s market. In the fall of 2024, we harvested the biggest corn crop in history and by September of 2025 it was essentially all gone. 11 million tonnes of corn disappeared in 11 months.
The critical difference between 2024 and 2025 is that last year Ontario set a record for the highest average yields per acre ever measured in this province and in 2025 it is at least rumoured that crop insurance may pay out the highest ever number of dollars in crop insurance claims in the program’s history.
Until harvest is complete, we won’t know exactly how much lower 2025’s corn and soybean yields actually are, but it is very obvious that there will not be a domestic surplus of corn produced in Ontario in 2025.
When we look south to our neighbours in the United States harvesting an extremely big corn crop this fall and having a limited amount of storage space to tuck it away in, the fact that Ontario is not going to have to export corn this year, means that we are not going to need to get cheap enough to compete with them in the global market. To be perfectly clear on this, we are going to see some exports of Ontario corn out of the Lakes terminals this fall, but most of that business was put on the books before the summer’s drought had fully taken hold.
The core market for this year’s Ontario corn crop is going to be into our substantially-sized eastern Canadian end users who are more than capable of consuming the entirety of this year’s drought shrunken crop.
This unique supply situation for the 2025 Ontario corn crop sets up a set of road side ditches for growers to use as they plan out the remainder of their corn marketing decisions.
On the one side is the global export market value. If there are storage constraints, in terms of having enough bin capacity at harvest, Ontario may have to export some corn this fall. There is plenty of terminal capacity and experienced traders who are capable of merchandizing Ontario corn to the global market, but the world price is dominated by offers from countries with surplus supplies, (like our neighbors to the south). If our prices get that low, they will not need to remain there for very long, because in 2025–2026 eastern Canada’s corn demand will exceed our domestic production.
The other road side ditch in this year’s corn market is U.S. replacement prices. In spite of the fact that Ontario may produce little more corn in 2025 than the eastern Canadian end use demand can use, prices will not be able to rise above the cost of bringing American corn in to cover our domestic market’s needs.
The challenging part of establishing a marketing target for Ontario corn growers is that our end users do not have equal access to imported corn. There are a couple of end users of corn in Ontario who have the capacity to receive vessel loads of corn from U.S. ports. Other end users are equipped with rail sidings which provide them with access to corn from across the continent. Because there are such big disparities in the freight spreads across Ontario, corn growers are going to need to study the potential cost of U.S. replacement corn flowing into their traditional market in order to know where to set their price expectations.
One of the frustrating parts of the Americans having such a big corn crop in 2025 is that it limits the upside on Canadian pricing, but if we pay close attention to U.S. corn values flowing into Canada, we will have a good target point for marketing our own crop.
Steve Kell is a Simcoe County crop farmer and handles grain merchandizing for Kell Grain, with elevators in Belleville and Gilford.
