BURLINGTON, NC – Over 70 people attended the 2025 Northern Piedmont Field Crop Meeting, organized by North Carolina Extension in Alamance County.
One of the presenters was Dr. Nick Piggott, professor of agricultural economics at NC State. He spoke both on the current soybean market and on a study he performed on whether storing grain in North Carolina is profitable.
“From 2022 to 2023 there was a big drop-off in cash receipts for soybean producers,” Piggott observed. “In 2024 livestock producers were doing better than crop producers. In fact, ending stocks of soybeans were 11% higher at the end of 2024 than at the end of 2023.
“It’s simple demand and supply: the reason soybean prices are down significantly is because we have plenty of beans around the world.”
Soybean prices decreased in 2024 because there was a large inventory at the beginning of the year, an increased amount of acreage was planted and yields were good. Even though demand was up, it was not enough to offset the increase in supply.
In 2025, the opportunities for better pricing for soybeans will come from reduced acreage planted or bad weather.
As Piggott put it, “we need a production shock to eat up the beans we have in storage.”
Dr. Nick Piggott spoke at the Northern Piedmont Field Crop meeting about the soybean market. Photo by Karl H. Kazaks
Piggott also noted that there has not been much recent investment in grain storage in North Carolina. As a result, he said, “that means at harvest there is a bottleneck of supply.”
So Piggott recently undertook a study to determine whether it would be profitable for Tar Heel State grain growers to invest in storage. In his study he examined futures pricing for corn and soybeans across long periods of time.
“What we were looking at is how much is the market willing to pay you to store corn and beans?” he said.
The results showed that there is a more significant advantage to storing beans than there is to storing corn. Prices for beans tend to be relatively stronger in the summer months as compared to at harvest times.
“Storage doesn’t pay every year,” Piggott said, “but when it does, it does.”
The average lifespan of a grain bin is 45 years. “We can say with confidence if you store beans over the lifetime of a bin,” Piggott said, “on average it pays.”
by Karl H. Kazaks
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