You will see a lot of farmers losing it all next year. I know of quite a few producers that leveraged themselves to the hilt in order to buy land, equipment, fertilizer, and seed.
Dropping the corn price by 40% means that many of these guys no longer will be turning a profit no matter how much corn they plant. The cash flow is such that even planting corn will be losing money (can’t afford the payments on the planter, let alone seed and fertilizer).
I don’t expect prices at the store to fall much. To many packers want the high prices, and they are worried about government mandates coming that will cut off their EBT and school customers (yes that is a HUGE market). So they have a vested interest in artificially keeping meat prices high.
Long term, this isn’t going to be a good thing. As the farmers get squeezed out, NGO’s keeping buying up land to take out of production. We already are importing food, and it will get worse. Between the large corps and the NGO’s, I expect that food prices will keep rising.
When the State sets the rules, the market no longer applies.
In the past, farmers protected themselves by diversifying. The corn croppers feed out cattle/hogs, plants beans or some other grain. That’s harder to do now with the huge mega-acreage corn growers. The easiest transition is to beans.