The good news doesn’t stop with soybeans. Joe Hickson, owner of Midnight Acres in Kawartha Lakes, says May corn could be locked in for more than $200 per tonne. Most of the corn in Ontario was selling for about $140 per tonne the last week of February.

Hickson says that farmers in the Lindsay-Peterborough area will probably increase soybean acreage by about 10 per cent. Cooper believes the soybean acreage, estimated at 2 million acres several months ago across Ontario, will probably increase by five per cent to 10 per cent.

One consequence of the euphoria over beans has been a tight supply of seeds and a price increase for seed of about five per cent over last year. The higher indexed beans have been pretty well sold out, Hickson says. He told Farmers Forum that many farmers were still undecided. But the corn acreage in the area will probably be reduced.

"The last three years we’ve had small windows for planting," he says. "We’ve increased spring wheat this year but if the weather isn’t right by the end of April farmers will switch."

Near Cornwall, Seaway Grain Processors president Bud Atkins says it’s a good time to sell next year’s crop. "At $140 (per tonne of corn) you’ll be able to cover yourself. If the price goes down and you have a lot of debt, you’re in trouble."

He says you can gamble with the price but you stand to lose a lot. "You lose about 90 per cent of the time," he said. He agrees with the experts that the best way is to sell a crop is by increments. But that requires farm storage. Says Hickson: "The only way to make money on spring grain is to have on-farm storage." That way you can avoid lower prices which sometimes occur when the crop comes off the fields.

Pretty well everyone agrees on the cause of the price rise. The world shortage on grain reserves have been spurred by fears that the South American soybean crop has suffered at the hands of some unexpected bad weather.