The Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture’s Crop Basis Tool can be used to examine weekly nearby and deferred basis for corn and soybeans in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Daily cash price data from individual grain elevators and processors are averaged within each crop reporting district to create a regional average cash price series. The regional average cash price data is used to compute weekly basis (cash price minus futures price) for corn and soybeans, using Wednesday cash and futures prices to generate weekly basis data for each crop and crop reporting region. The number of buyers vary by crop reporting district and by week, depending on how many buyers choose to report their cash prices. Cash price data are provided by DTN and represent approximately 2,000 buyers across the four states.

To facilitate comparisons across years in the Crop Basis Tool, a crop year is defined as having 48 weeks with four weeks per month. When a month has five Wednesdays, prices from the fourth and fifth Wednesdays are averaged and reported as the fourth week. As a result, Week = 1 is the first week of September (beginning of the crop year), Week = 5 is the first week of October, and so on.

Latest Update (06/10/2022):  Corn and soybean basis continue to strengthen following historical basis patterns for this time of year in many locations across the Eastern Corn Belt. With that said, there is continued strength in soybean basis at river market locations in Southern Illinois and Southern Indiana as well as soybean processors in Northern Illinois. The chart below shows current soybean basis (black line) and the historical 5-year average soybean basis (blue line) for Southeast Illinois. As you can see, current soybean basis is $0.36/bu. over July ’22 soybean futures, which is nearly $0.56/bu. stronger than the historical 5-year average soybean basis for this time of year. With limited old crop soybean availability, the tug-of-war between processors and river (export) markets is likely to continue this summer. Visit the Purdue Crop Basis Tool to check current corn and soybean basis levels and historical basis trends for your local area.