Life just got better for corn growers. Heat units of 3,200
assisted by ample rains boosted average yields across eastern
and east-central Ontario to more than 130 bushels an acre, almost the equivalent of last year’s record yield.

Two years ago the average yield across Ontario was 119 bushels an acre.

As if that isn’t enough, while crop dried in the field prices rose from the pits and lifted farmers’ spirits with them. Depending on what time frames you use, corn prices rose by a third to 50 per cent in a matter of weeks. Crop prices rose to $135 per tonne at the elevator the last week of October and to $143 for the 2007 crop. That’s from a summertime low of $90 and $100.

Crop advisor Larry Hutchinson was with a farmer when he combined several fields of corn in Northumberland with yields averaging 162 bushels an acre. When he finished, Hutchinson said, "we sat on the step and the farmer was smiling," as if a great burden had lifted. After four years of depression, a light was beginning to shine.

But there are problems. "We had seven inches of rain in October and the geese are swimming in some fields," he says. In Renfrew County, 19 inches of rain in September and October have turned some fields into quagmires. The brooks look like spring runoff time and tractors are pulling tractors out of the mud.

"Some people are trying to get the silage off and the fields won’t carry the weight," says Larry Reaburn, a Renfrew crop farmer.

The price boost had been expected for so long, however, that many farmers were sceptical. But Bud Atkins says this is a real change in the market. The former president of Seaway Valley Ethanol Cooperative said that until recently speculators were driving the market but now the buyers from the plants have jumped aboard.

The reason for the price hike is not an earth-shattering secret, says Joe Hickson, owner of Midnight Acres, near Lindsay. "We’ve had a 30-year world low for years and the demand is catching up. We’re not caught up yet."

In addition, this year’s U.S. ethanol industry has taken 23 per cent of the country’s corn production, a figure that could rise to 40 per cent in five years. Ontario and Quebec have nine ethanol plants either in production or in various stages of development.

At current prices for gasoline, plants can pay up to $6 a bushel for corn and still make a profit, he said.