NET BID Illinois corn · USDA AMS

Method and limits

Everything this tool is confident about, and everything it is guessing at, in the order it matters.

The one calculation

For each delivery option the tool takes the bid USDA reports, subtracts the round-trip trucking cost per bushel, and ranks on what is left:

net $/bu = reported bid − freight $/bu

Freight is the round trip, not one way, because the truck comes home empty. It counts truck cost per mile, fuel at your mileage and your diesel price, the driver's hours at road speed, and the fixed turn time at the scale. Divided over the bushels on the load, it lands near 0.8¢ a bushel for every one-way mile at the default assumptions. Over sixty miles that is about 47¢, which on a normal day is about the entire spread between the best- and worst-paying channel in Illinois. That single fact is the reason this site exists.

That 0.8¢ is a diagnostic, not a rate, and multiplying it by miles is the single easiest way to get this wrong. Turn time at the scale is a fixed charge per load, so cost per mile falls as the haul lengthens: 0.88¢ a mile at eight miles, 0.78¢ at seventy. The site never multiplies the rule of thumb by a distance. It runs the full round-trip formula for every option and every comparison on the page.

Distance is estimated road miles from the county centroid to the nearest licensed buyer we have coordinates for in that region and channel: the straight line scaled by 1.2, because Illinois section roads run longer than the crow flight. It is not a routed driving distance, and the figure you see is the one the freight cost is computed from. It is still a planning number, not your odometer. Most buyer coordinates are town centroids rather than driveways, which is good to a mile or two, so treat every freight and net figure on the site as carrying 1 to 2¢ a bushel of unavoidable slack.

The ranking is also capped by a furthest haul you set on the main page, defaulting to sixty miles. That is not cosmetic: the trucking model is validated against published Illinois custom haul rates over roughly the first sixty miles and drifts beyond it, and a two-hundred-mile option is a nine-hour driving day the arithmetic prices but does not judge. Raise the cap if you really would make that trip.

Where the bids come from

One upstream source: the daily USDA Agricultural Marketing Service state grain bid reports for Illinois and its neighbours. These are works of the United States government and are in the public domain. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to USDA, and does not use the USDA shield.

A single report carries both the cash bids and the CBOT corn futures settlements, so basis and flat price on this site come from one document that USDA has already reconciled internally. Reports are published on business days and the site is exactly as fresh as the last one it could parse. The generated timestamp is in the footer of every page.

What a "bid" on this site actually is

This is the limit that matters most, so it is repeated next to every number on the site rather than left down here.

AMS publishes a range, per region, per buyer channel. A row means "country elevators in the North Central region were paying between these two numbers for corn delivered now". It does not mean any particular elevator paid it, and it is not a quote you can hold anyone to. Bids differ far more between channels, an ethanol plant against a country elevator, than they do between neighbouring regions, which is why the channel is shown as prominently as the place.

Why there are no per-elevator bids

Because there is no free and lawful source for them, and that was checked properly rather than assumed. Per-buyer corn bids are published in bulk only under commercial licence from a small number of market data vendors, whose terms do not permit redistribution and whose free tiers have been withdrawn. Buying that licence is the honest upgrade path for this site, and until someone does, a regional range clearly labelled as a regional range beats a precise-looking number that was never really there.

The same applies to the futures. Exchange-licensed real-time and delayed CBOT data for public display is a paid product; the USDA report is the source you can legally build on, and it is the one used here.

County to region, and why it is marked with a confidence

The report groups country elevators into five Illinois regions. USDA does not publish a county list for them. That was searched for across roughly thirty official sources and it does not exist. So every county on this site is assigned to a region by us, and the assignment is labelled with how much to trust it:

From the report
The report or its own definitions name this county. Take it as fact.
High confidence
Inferred from geography with no competing reading.
Medium confidence
Inferred, and a neighbouring region is arguable. A second reading is shown where one exists.
Low confidence
Assigned by elimination, meaning we know which regions it is not in. Several east-central counties fall here. This is our reading, not a fact.

Across the state the split runs roughly 21 sourced, 50 high, 17 medium, 14 low. The region is overridable on the main page for exactly this reason: if you know which region your elevator reports into, you know it better than we do, and the ranking should use your answer.

The buyer list

Buyer records come from state grain dealer and warehouse licensing registries and, for river terminals, published dock coordinates. These are public records.

A licence is not a bid. It proves a company may legally buy corn at a site. It does not mean they post a producer bid there, or that they want your corn today. Buyers where a public producer bid page was actually observed are flagged; everything else is a licence record and a phone number. Illinois Grain Insurance Fund participation is shown where known, because who you sell to is a counterparty decision as well as a price decision.

Sell now or store

The comparison is:

return to storage = basis appreciation − interest − physical storage

Measured against a constant futures reference. There is deliberately no carry term. The carry in the futures spread and the basis appreciation you are hoping for are largely the same money, and adding both counts it twice. Carry belongs to you only if you sold the deferred contract against the grain, and this comparison does not assume you hedged.

The basis appreciation input is an unverified estimate, and it is the whole answer. Somewhere between 20¢ and 25¢ of assumed appreciation the result changes sign. That is why the sensitivity table ships open and why the headline storage number should be read as an illustration of the table rather than as a conclusion.

For the long view: Carl Zulauf's farmdoc work covers 51 crop years of Illinois corn and finds net returns to storage are not statistically different from zero. Storage is a position, not a yield.

Things this tool deliberately does not do

Privacy

No analytics, no cookies, no fonts or scripts from anywhere else, no third-party requests of any kind. The county you pick is stored in your own browser so the page remembers it next time, and it is in the page URL so you can bookmark it. It is not sent anywhere except to this site's own ranking endpoint, and nothing about you is logged against it.

Not advice

Informational only. This is not financial, trading, hedging or tax advice, and not an offer to buy or sell anything. Prices move, reports lag, and the arithmetic rests on assumptions you can and should change. Verify every number with your buyer before you load a truck.

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