Where to haul Illinois corn today, ranked by net return after freight
Sixty miles of road costs about 47¢ a bushel in freight, which on a normal day is about the whole spread between Illinois' best- and worst-paying channel. So the biggest bid you can find is usually the wrong place to haul it. This ranks every option USDA reports near you by what is left after the truck.
Pick your county to get today's answer.
Until then, here is the idea the whole tool is built on. Two options, the same day. One pays 40¢ a bushel more. It still loses.
Example, not market dataFreight runs roughly 0.8¢ a bushel for every one-way mile once fuel, truck cost, your time and the wait at the scale are counted, but it is not a straight line, because turn time at the scale is a fixed charge per load and a short haul carries it over fewer miles. Run the model rather than the rule of thumb and the 62 extra miles cost 47.8¢ a bushel, against the 40¢ of extra bid on offer. The near load wins by 7.8¢. The far buyer would have to post 47.8¢ more just to tie.
Every option, ranked by net not by bid
One delivery period at a time, always. Ranking a bid for corn delivered now against a bid for corn delivered in November is the classic mistake in this business, so this table cannot do it. Rows with no distance have no licensed buyer on file with coordinates, so they cannot be netted and they fall to the bottom.
Two kinds of number share this table, and they are not the same claim. A row tagged USDA range is what AMS reports the whole channel is paying across a region: a range and an average, never one elevator's bid, and nobody has promised it. A row tagged named is a bid one named elevator published on its own public page, with the site, the delivery period and the time we read it. That is better information, so where we hold a fresh one it drives the number — but a posted bid is still not a contract. Boards move intraday, a bid can be withdrawn, and what you are filled at depends on grade, moisture, hours and space. Ring them before you load. A named bid stops driving the row once it is more than two business days old, and the USDA range takes over.
Every distance names what it is measured to. On a named row that is the elevator's own address. On a USDA row it is the nearest licensed buyer we hold coordinates for in that region and channel, which is a fair basis for comparison and a poor substitute for the actual driveway. Open any row with “Who is here?” for the posted bids and the licensed buyers behind it, nearest first, with phone numbers.
How precise these cents are. Most buyer coordinates are town centroids, not driveways, so a distance here is good to a mile or two. That is worth roughly 1 to 2¢ a bushel of freight either way, and it moves the net by the same amount. Read the ordering and the size of the gaps; do not read a difference of under a couple of cents between two rows as real.
What these numbers rest on
Posted bids with nowhere to rank them real, and not comparable
These are bids from named elevators that no row in the table above can honestly be ranked against. USDA prints no Illinois ethanol panel at all, and it puts mills and processors behind a confidential reporter panel, so a real posted bid from an ethanol plant down the road has nothing to be compared with. Throwing it away because the USDA backbone has no slot for it would discard the best information on the page, so it sits here instead, with its own price, its own distance and its own net — and it is never mixed into the ranking. The same warning applies: a posted bid is not a contract, so confirm it before you haul.
Where these places are the same coordinates the freight is computed from
A column of mile counts is hard to argue with and easy to misread. This plots your county against every buyer and named elevator in the ranking that we hold a coordinate for, so you can see the geography rather than infer it. The ring is your furthest-haul setting.
Tap or focus a point to see what it is.
Drawn entirely in your browser from data this site already ships. There is no tile server and no map provider: nothing about where you are, or where you are looking, leaves this page. That is why the outline is a plain shape rather than a satellite image.
Freight assumptions yours will differ
These seven numbers decide the ranking. The defaults are built bottom-up for an owner-operated semi and cross-checked against published Illinois custom haul rates, but the right number is farm-specific. Change any of them and everything above re-ranks.
Grain is assumed to be in sellable condition already. There is no moisture, shrink, drying or quality-discount arithmetic anywhere on this page, by decision. If your corn is wet, every number here is optimistic by whatever your buyer's discount schedule says.
Who to call the actual next step
A licence is not a bid. These companies are licensed to buy corn at these sites; only the ones marked posts bids were observed publishing a producer bid page. The number on this page came from a regional range, so the only way to find out what any of them will pay you is to ring them.
Sell now, or store it read the sensitivity, not the answer
The storage answer turns on one input: how much the basis appreciates between now and when you sell. That figure is an unverified estimate. Anywhere between 20¢ and 25¢ the answer changes sign, from "storing pays" to "storing costs you". It is not a small effect at the edges of a plausible range. It is the entire result, and nobody knows the true value in advance.
So the sensitivity table is the answer here and the headline number is only an illustration of it. That is why the table is open by default and always will be.
Sensitivity: what the answer does across the range
Carl Zulauf's farmdoc series covers 51 crop years of Illinois corn. Across that whole record, net returns to storing corn are not statistically different from zero. Storage sometimes pays and sometimes does not, and over half a century the two cancel out once interest and physical storage are charged against the gain.
Nothing on this page overturns that. A positive number in the table above is one estimate, on one day, at one guess about basis. Treat storage as a bet you are choosing to place, not as a return you are collecting.
The arithmetic is basis appreciation, less interest, less physical storage, measured against a constant futures reference. There is deliberately no carry term: the carry in the futures spread and the basis appreciation are largely the same money, and adding both counts it twice. Carry is yours only if you sold the deferred contract against the grain, and this comparison does not assume you did.
CBOT corn settlements from the same report
These come out of the same USDA report as the cash bids above, so the basis and the flat price are internally consistent. They are settlements, not live quotes, and they are as old as the report.