Despite corn topping $8 a bushel, some farmers wary

The banner year for corn may not be what it's cracked up to be.

Brandon Fast says it used to cost him $250 a wheel to replace the tires on his 18wheeler on his farm near Mountain Lake, Minnesota.

Now, that price is nearly double — just one reason he's not yet celebrating the near-historic $8 a bushel and up corn prices popping up at some ethanol plants and grain elevators throughout southwestern Minnesota.

"It's almost one step forward, two steps back at this point," said Fast, a corn farmer who also runs a seed and chemical business, on Thursday. Between new tires, fertilizer and a backlog of shipping containers in Chinese ports, Fast worries attention given the rocketing prices will mask the real story.

"We have land owners who think that we're just making hand-over-fist as they hear on the radio about $8 corn and $16 beans," said Fast. "But we're not making as much as they think we're making, of course, because our inputs are going up."

On Monday, corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade surpassed — for the first time in nearly a decade — $8 a bushel, an eye-popping number given the price just two Aprils ago sank to $3 at the onset of the pandemic.

Farmers, who can be circumspect in the good times while waiting for the bad, have said they worry the quickening pace of prices may just as soon tumble.

"Eight-dollar corn is about as good as it gets," said Ed Usset, a grain marketing economist for the Center for Farm Financial Management at the University of Minnesota, on Friday. But farmers are wary of the day when "the price falls apart, but the costs don't," he said.