2026 Southern Minnesota Crop Outlook: An Agronomist’s Perspective
South central Minnesota has been on a roller coaster this year. We started 2026 looking at sub $4.00 cash corn with no real fundamentals to suggest a market correction was coming. Then, just like the older generation says, when everyone is staring the bear in the face, the bull shows up to offer hope. Spring brought a fifty cent rally and the best planting window we have seen in over a decade. God has since blessed the bulk of south central Minnesota with one of the finest growing seasons we have ever seen.
The market is as volatile as ever, but the saving grace for our farming community is the prospect of a bumper crop. Coming into fall, the outlook is positive. From an agronomist’s perspective, I have not seen this many harvestable ears of corn since 2021. Between the deep green color and the lack of disease pressure, I think this corn crop may be special. Beans are always harder to judge, but I am counting 10 to 15 percent more pods than last year. If we finish strong, we have the potential for a bumper crop in both corn and beans.
So how does this affect the farmland market? If we finish strong and capture yields at 110 to 120 percent of APH, that should keep the farmland market steady. That is not an earth-shattering correlation. The more interesting question is why farmers keep buying farmland even when the ag economy is not booming.
Part of the answer is that farmland is a far better way to ride the inflation wave than something like gold. For a farmer who never plans to sell, appreciation in the land itself mostly just strengthens the balance sheet on paper. What often gets overlooked is the growth in the land’s earning power. Modern corn genetics are adding roughly 1.9 bushels per acre per year. That means a farm returning 2 to 3 percent cash on cash today could be returning 10 to 12 percent a decade from now, on top of the appreciation of the land itself. Farmland puts in new highs when the farm economy is good and holds its value even when margins are thin.
Farmers are resilient people. Despite the recent stretch of tough ag economics, they are still willing to invest in farmland at strong levels because of the long term, multi-generational opportunity the land represents.