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 1.33, 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.

Most numbers here come from AMS, which 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.

Named elevator bids, and why there are so few

On top of that backbone the site carries real cash bids from named elevators, read from the public producer bid boards of a handful of grain companies. Where one of those boards names a site, a price and a delivery window, we know something strictly better than a regional range: who, where, how much, and as of when. Those rows are tagged named, they carry the time we read the board, and every one links back to the exact page the number came from so you can check it before you ring anyone.

A named row and a USDA row are not two readings of the same haul, so they are two rows. A USDA row's distance is measured to the nearest licensed buyer we hold a coordinate for in that region and channel — a business whose own bid we do not know. A named row's distance is measured to the elevator that actually posted the price. Those are different addresses, often twenty miles apart, so folding the named price into the regional row would swap the destination without saying so. Both are ranked, both on net, and each row says which it is and what its distance is measured to.

A named bid stops driving anything once it is more than two business days old, and the USDA range takes over with a note. A stale elevator price presented as today's is worse than an honest range, because it looks precise. Business days rather than calendar days, so a Friday board is still current on Monday.

The absence of an elevator here says nothing about what it pays. Most of the market's per-buyer 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. One vendor obfuscates its prices in the page and de-obfuscates them in script, which is circumvention rather than a disagreement about terms, and is not something this site will do. So the named layer covers the companies that publish openly and permit it, and nobody else — a small and unrepresentative slice of the market, and it is labelled as such rather than presented as coverage.

Where the named layer is silent, a regional range clearly labelled as a regional range beats a precise-looking number that was never really there. Licensing a commercial per-buyer feed remains the honest upgrade path for full coverage.

How those boards are read

Every one of these sources is used only because its own robots.txt permits the bid path and it serves without anti-bot measures. That permission is the entire licence to be there, so:

• Requests carry a descriptive User-Agent naming this site and a contact address. It never varies.
• robots.txt is re-read and re-evaluated on every run, not cached from the audit. A source that later disallows the bid path stops being used with no code change.
• Published Crawl-delay is honoured. One of these sites asks for ten seconds; it gets ten seconds.
• At most twice a day, roughly twelve hours apart. Bid boards move once or twice a business day, so a third fetch would be rude and would tell you nothing new.
• A 403 or 429 stops that source, is recorded in the data file, and the affected options fall back to the USDA range. It is never retried behind a different User-Agent, a proxy, or altered headers. A block is an answer.
• No logins, no paywalls, no API keys, and nothing that defeats or decodes an anti-scraping measure.

One source publishes competitor destination columns beside its own elevators. A bid in one of those columns is that company's published view of a competitor's bid, not the competitor's own posting, and the site says so on the row rather than quietly presenting it as the competitor's number.

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

• No moisture, shrink, drying or quality math. Grain is assumed already in sellable condition. If your corn is wet, every number here is optimistic by whatever your buyer's discount schedule says, and that schedule differs by buyer.
• No comparing across delivery periods. A bid for corn delivered now and a bid for corn delivered in November are different products. The ranking groups by delivery period so the comparison cannot be made by accident. A named elevator bid joins a period only when its own published delivery window overlaps that period's calendar window; one the board left open ("Fall 2026", "Spot", "New Crop") is never placed, because an undated bid cannot be shown to be comparable and guessing its window is exactly the error this rule exists to prevent.
• No cherry-picking between the two layers. A named bid is shown whether it beats the regional range or falls short of it. Surfacing it only when it flattered the answer would bias every number on the page upward.
• No guessing which company a bid belongs to. A named bid is matched to a licensed buyer record only when the company names agree; geography alone is never enough, because two grain companies in one town is ordinary. A bid we cannot match keeps its price, its coordinates and its net, and is listed separately rather than attached to a region it might not be in.
• No live prices. Everything is as fresh as the last USDA report, and no fresher.
• No invented values. Where the report omits a cell, or no buyer with coordinates is on file, the page shows a dash. It never shows a zero or a plausible guess in place of a number it does not have.

The map

Every point on it is a real coordinate out of the data files: your county's Census centroid, the licensed buyers in your ranking, and the named elevators' own published positions. The state outline is a simplified boundary carried for orientation only — it is scenery, no calculation touches it, and no number on the site derives from it.

It is drawn as inline vector graphics in your own browser rather than with a mapping library, and that is a privacy decision rather than a technical one: a tile layer would send your viewport, and therefore roughly where your farm is, to a third party on every pan. That is the most sensitive thing this page knows about you.

A buyer we hold no coordinate for is named underneath the map with the reason, never silently dropped off it. Fifty-eight of the licensed buyers on file are in that position, each for a stated reason — usually that the town is not a Census place, so there is no centroid to use and no facility coordinate was ever sourced.

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.