RECORD SEASON: South Dakota corn crop expected to top billion bushel mark
Favorable weather could push this year’s harvest 118 million bushels above 2024
Corn, the long-time leader in South Dakota agricultural acres, has achieved a new milestone.
A billion-bushel harvest is in the offing, if a September forecast offered by federal officials holds together.
Bushels headed for markets or storage will hit 1.02 billion, if the outcome predicted by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service is on the mark.
A bin buster of such dimensions has never happened before, said DaNita Murray, executive director of the grower organization South Dakota Corn.
In fact, the highest output dating back to 2020 was last year’s 883 million bushels. The biggest driver of record output is not yield per acre, but total acres, which increased to more than 6 million from about 5.4 million in 2024.
South Dakota is one of just six states with a billion-bushel forecast.
Timely rains did boost yield prospects in the Sioux Falls area, Murray said. “I think other parts of the state were not as fortunate. They got too much rain.”
Farmers with better growing conditions still face a variety of challenges, including harvesting weather, uncertain exports and decisions about how to store so much corn.
As to the approach of harvest season, “I would be surprised if anybody gets going this week, for sure,” Murray said.
On the marketing side, she called soybeans “the tip of the spear” in weak export forecasts. But China is also holding back on corn purchases during a trade dispute with the Trump Administration.
The Chinese “have not begun much of anything” on the corn side of the trade ledger either, she said.
