Corn Farming in the United States

NAICS 2022 code 111150 — establishments primarily growing corn (except sweet corn) and/or producing corn seed. NAICS stands for the North American Industry Classification System, the standard the U.S. and Canadian and Mexican governments use to group businesses by activity.

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1. Overview

Corn is the largest crop in American agriculture. In 2022, about 289,000 U.S. farms harvested roughly 80.6 million acres of corn for grain and produced 13.7 billion bushels, and corn's crop value that year was about $88.5 billion — the single most valuable crop and second only to cattle across all farm commodities.[1][2] Farmers plant more corn than any other crop, close to 90–98 million acres a year.[3][5]

Corn sits at the base of a very large supply chain. It is the main feed for cattle, hogs, and poultry; the feedstock for nearly all U.S. fuel ethanol; and a leading export, in which the United States is the world's top shipper.[6][14] Corn prices ripple into meat, dairy, packaged food, biofuel, fertilizer, farm equipment, and farmland values, so the corn cycle is a lens on a large slice of the real economy.

The key thing to grasp up front: you cannot really buy "a corn farm" on a public exchange. Growing corn is overwhelmingly private, family-owned, and fragmented across hundreds of thousands of operators. Public and private capital reach the industry indirectly — through the input suppliers (seed, fertilizer, machinery), the buyers and processors (grain merchants, ethanol makers), the farmland itself, and the commodity via futures and funds. Those routes are laid out in sections 4 and 10.

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2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. The U.S. Census Bureau defines NAICS 111150 as establishments primarily engaged in growing corn (except sweet corn) or producing corn seed.[25] Production generally ends "at the farm gate" — the first point of sale or price determination. The vast majority of the crop is field corn (dent corn) destined for animal feed, ethanol, and processing, not the sweet corn eaten off the cob.

What it excludes (adjacent NAICS codes). The money and the manufacturing that surround corn sit in other codes:[25]

• Sweet corn for fresh human consumption is a vegetable crop — 111219 (Other Vegetable and Melon Farming), not 111150.
• Other field crops have their own codes: soybeans 111110, wheat 111140, rice 111160, oilseed-and-grain combination 111191, all other grain 111199.
• Turning corn into ethanol is manufacturing — 325193 (Ethyl Alcohol Manufacturing) — and wet corn milling / starch and sweetener is 311221, neither of which is farming.
• Grain elevators, storage, and merchant wholesaling fall under 493130 (Farm Product Warehousing) and 424510 (Grain and Field Bean Merchant Wholesalers).
• Custom harvesting, spraying, and other hired field work are support activities — 115112/115113/115114.

So this primer is about the growers, while most of the investable money (section 4) sits in the codes just listed around them.

A count caveat. A single farm often grows corn, soybeans, wheat, and/or livestock together, so a crop count (farms that harvested corn) is not identical to a count of NAICS 111150 establishments. Treat the farm and acreage figures below as the physical size of corn production, not a company census.

Ownership mix. Corn farming is a classic fragmented, owner-operated industry. USDA (the U.S. Department of Agriculture) reports that family farms are roughly 95% of all U.S. farms; large-scale family farms are under 4% of farms but produce about half of all U.S. agricultural output by value.[7] Land tenure is distinctive: renting is the norm in the Corn Belt. About 60% of U.S. farmland is owner-operated (roughly 40% rented), but for grain-and-oilseed acres specifically, roughly 53% is rented rather than owned by the operator.[8] A typical corn operation therefore blends owned ground with cash-rented or share-rented land, and the landowner and the farmer are often different people — an important split for anyone thinking about where returns actually accrue.

Consolidation is real but incomplete. Nearly 289,000 farms grew corn for grain in 2022, yet the largest operations account for a disproportionate share of acreage and value; a long tail of small and mid-size farms persists, cushioned by off-farm income and government support.[1][7]

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3. How big it is

Federal statistics tell the story from two angles, and choosing the right one matters.

Census of Agriculture (the right lens here), 2022:[1][2]

• ~289,000 farms harvested corn for grain.
• ~80.6 million acres of corn for grain harvested — about 29% of all U.S. harvested cropland.
• ~13.7 billion bushels produced; ~$88.5 billion in corn crop value — the top U.S. crop.

USDA annual production data (recent crops):

• The 2024 crop was 14.9 billion bushels at a then-record 179.3 bushels per acre on 82.9 million harvested acres.[3]
• The 2025 crop set a new record — on the order of 16.7 billion bushels at a record yield near 186 bushels per acre, on roughly 98 million planted acres.[4]
• For 2026, USDA estimated 95.3 million acres planted (down 3%) and about 87.4 million acres to be harvested for grain, with corn stocks of 5.29 billion bushels (up 14%) — a supply picture that has weighed on prices.[5]
• Iowa and Illinois alone typically produce about one-third of the U.S. crop; the top four states (Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota) grow more than half. Corn is more than 95% of all U.S. feed-grain production.[6]

The undercount caveat (important). Standard federal business statistics badly understate this industry. Counts built from employer firms — County Business Patterns, the Economic Census, and the Small Business Administration's (SBA's) business tallies — miss most corn farms because the great majority have no paid employees: they are family operations run by the owner, often part-time, frequently structured as individuals or partnerships rather than firms. The SBA's size standard for corn farming — the receipts ceiling below which a business counts as "small" — is just $2.5 million in average annual receipts,[9] and most operations fall well under it. Our authoritative ingested statistics file contains only this SBA figure; it reports no establishment count, revenue, payroll, or employment for NAICS 111150, and we do not infer them. To size this industry, use USDA's Census of Agriculture (which counts farms), not the business registers that count companies with payroll.

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4. The investable universe

There is essentially no pure-play, publicly traded "corn farm." Growing is private and fragmented. Investors get exposure through the businesses that sell to farmers, buy from them, own the land, or trade the commodity itself. Tickers and scale below are for investable-universe context only.

REIT = real estate investment trust (a company that owns income property and passes most of its profit to shareholders as dividends). ETF = exchange-traded fund. For the listed operating companies, results reflect their margins — trading and processing spreads (ADM, BG, ANDE), input demand (CTVA, NTR, CF), or equipment-replacement cycles (DE) — more than farm-level profit. Farmland REITs (FPI, LAND) are the closest listed proxy for owning the ground corn grows on: their economic exposure is land rent and land value, while tenants generally bear crop-production risk. Company scale and exposure figures come from SEC Form 10-K and annual-report filings.[21]

Major private and cooperative owners. The biggest hands in the corn chain are not public:[22]

• Cargill — a private global grain merchant and processor that sources, stores, trades, transports, and processes corn; one of the largest private companies in America.
• CHS, Land O'Lakes / WinField United, and GROWMARK — large farmer-owned cooperatives that supply seed, chemicals, agronomy, and grain marketing to member-farmers.
• Scoular — a large independent private grain, feed, and biofuel-supply company.
• POET — the largest U.S. ethanol producer, privately held; a major corn buyer alongside farmer-owned ethanol co-ops.

Institutional farmland. The land itself is owned by a long tail of families and retired farmers plus a growing set of institutions — Nuveen Natural Capital (TIAA's farmland arm), PGIM, Manulife, and private-equity farmland funds — that own ground and lease it to operators; they are landlords, not typically NAICS 111150 operators.[23]

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5. How the money works

Corn farming is a commodity, price-taker business: the grower sells an undifferentiated product at a market price set globally and cannot mark it up. Profit is the thin gap between a yield-driven revenue line and a large, mostly fixed cost stack.

Revenue = yield × price (adjusted for basis).

• Yield (bushels per acre) is driven by genetics, weather, and soil; national yield has climbed for decades to a record near 186 bu/acre in 2025.[4]
• Price is the season-average farm price per bushel, set by supply/demand and traded on futures. It is highly cyclical: it spiked above ~$6.50 in 2022, then fell to roughly $4.15 for the 2024/25 crop as record harvests piled up.[12]
• Basis — the gap between the local cash price and the futures price — plus delivery timing, storage, and quality decide what a farmer actually banks.

Costs per acre are the other half, and they are stubborn:

• Seed, fertilizer (especially nitrogen), and crop chemicals — the biggest variable inputs.[10]
• Land — cash rent is often the single largest line on the roughly half of acres that are rented.[8]
• Fuel, machinery, drying, labor, insurance, and interest.
• University of Illinois budgets put all-in 2025 costs on high-quality central-Illinois ground near $1,100–1,200 per acre, with lower-productivity ground somewhat less.[11]

The squeeze. Divide total cost by yield and you get a break-even price per bushel. In 2025 that break-even sat near $4.75 on high-cost ground — above the ~$3.90–$4.15 many growers could sell for — implying a real cash loss per acre on a lot of ground.[11][12] That is the defining feature of the business: corn farms carry operating leverage — machinery, land, and debt costs are fixed for a season while yields and prices are uncertain, so a poor harvest or weak basis turns a modest profit into a loss, and margins whipsaw from very good (2021–22) to negative (2024–25) within a few seasons.

Where owners actually make money over time:

1. Operating margin in good-price years — the cyclical up-legs, when price runs above break-even.
2. Yield gains and scale — more bushels per acre and fixed costs spread over more acres; this is why larger farms capture a rising share of acreage.[1]
3. Land appreciation — for owners (not renters), the largest long-run return is often the rising value of the farmland itself, not the crop. Farmland REITs monetize exactly this: rent income plus land value.[21]
4. Government support smooths the troughs (section 7).
5. Co-products — ethanol plants sell not just fuel but DDGS (distillers dried grains, a livestock feed) and corn oil, lifting the value extracted from each bushel.[13]

Farmland owners and merchants run different models: a landlord's return is cash rent plus land appreciation (tenant quality, soil, drainage, and water access matter more than the national corn price), while a merchant or processor should be judged on origination volume, basis management, processing spreads, energy costs, and co-product values — margins, not headline revenue that simply rose with price.

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6. What drives demand

U.S. corn use splits into a few big buckets, each with its own driver:[6][13]

• Livestock feed and residual — roughly 40% of use. Cattle, hog, and poultry numbers, feed-conversion rates, and the price of competing feeds set this demand. Cheap corn encourages livestock expansion; herd cycles feed back into corn.
• Ethanol — roughly 35–40% of use. Fuel ethanol takes about 5.5 billion bushels a year and is the largest industrial use; demand here is policy- and gasoline-driven (section 7). Note that roughly a third of that mass returns to the feed system as DDGS.[13]
• Exports — roughly 15% of use. The United States is the world's top corn exporter. Marketing-year 2024/25 shipments hit a record ~2.86 billion bushels (72.5 million metric tons, or MMT) worth about $16.4 billion, led by Mexico (~35% of exports), then Japan and Colombia.[14]
• The remainder is food, seed, and other industrial use — sweeteners (high-fructose corn syrup), starch, cereal, and beverage alcohol.

Longer-run demand judgments (forward-looking): global meat consumption supports feed demand; export volumes hinge on the size of competing crops in Brazil, Argentina, and Ukraine and on the strength of the dollar;[6] and the ethanol bucket's future rides on gasoline demand, blending policy, and whether sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) opens a new outlet for corn-based ethanol. Seed technology and precision agriculture keep raising yields — good for farm productivity, but they also lift national supply and can pressure prices. None of these outlets is guaranteed to grow.

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7. Regulation

Corn is one of the most policy-shaped crops in America. Several pillars matter:

1. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The RFS, run by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), requires set volumes of renewable fuel to be blended into the U.S. fuel supply, tracked with RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers) used for compliance. Corn ethanol satisfies the bulk of the "conventional" mandate, which is why ethanol is one of the two largest homes for the crop.[15] EPA finalized RFS volume standards for 2026 and 2027; related levers — year-round E15 (gasoline with up to 15% ethanol), E85 (up to 85%), small-refinery exemptions, and annual volume rules — move corn demand directly.[16] This policy link is the single biggest swing factor unique to corn versus other crops.

2. The Farm Bill safety net. Multiyear farm legislation funds price and income supports, administered by USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA). The two core programs are PLC (Price Loss Coverage), which pays when the season price falls below a set reference price, and ARC (Agriculture Risk Coverage), which pays when county revenue drops below a benchmark.[17] Reconciliation legislation enacted in July 2025 raised the statutory reference prices for PLC/ARC, strengthening the income floor under corn.[18]

3. Federal crop insurance. Heavily subsidized multi-peril crop insurance, run by USDA's Risk Management Agency (RMA), covers most corn acres against yield and revenue shortfalls and is, in dollar terms, the largest support corn growers receive. For 2026 and later, RMA added a Margin Coverage Option (MCO) for corn and other row crops in selected areas, protecting against margin deterioration from lower yields, lower prices, or higher input costs.[19] This safety net is what keeps a loss-year like 2025 survivable for many operations.

4. Pesticides and biotechnology. EPA regulates pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) — products must be registered and food-crop uses meet residue limits — and USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) reviews certain genetically modified (GMO) corn traits before commercial release.[20]

Other rules touch nutrient runoff and water quality, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that pays to idle fragile land, worker safety, and periodic trade actions (tariffs and retaliation, e.g., with China and Mexico) that can reroute export demand overnight.

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The grower level is fragmented and competitive — hundreds of thousands of price-taking farms, no pricing power, competing mainly on cost and yield. Larger farms spread machinery, agronomy, storage, labor, insurance, and financing over more acres, and often secure better input prices and market access. Consolidation is steady but slow and mostly private: it happens through land leases, neighboring-farm expansion, equipment purchases, farm-management agreements, and succession — not corporate takeovers — which makes it far less visible than in public markets.[7] Local conditions (soil, drainage, rainfall, road/rail access, proximity to ethanol plants or feedlots) remain decisive.

The striking concentration is in the layers around the farm, and it cuts both ways for growers:

• Seed and traits: a handful of firms — Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, BASF — dominate corn genetics and the traited-seed market.[24]
• Fertilizer: a few nitrogen makers (CF Industries, Nutrien, Koch, Yara) supply most U.S. nitrogen — a grower campaign has even pressed for a federal antitrust probe of fertilizer pricing.[24]
• Equipment: Deere, CNH, AGCO, and Kubota own the machinery market.
• Grain buying and processing: the "ABCD" traders — ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — plus ethanol plants and cooperatives are the main buyers.

The economic tension: growers buy inputs from concentrated suppliers and sell grain to concentrated buyers, while competing in a fragmented market themselves — a structural margin squeeze that recurs whenever crop prices fall.

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9. Risks

• Price cyclicality — the dominant risk. Corn prices can halve in a couple of seasons, flipping the industry from record profit to cash losses (2022 → 2025).[11][12]
• Weather and climate. Drought, flood, heat, frost, disease, or insect pressure in the Corn Belt can slash yields; because the crop is geographically concentrated, one bad Midwest summer hits national supply.
• Input-cost shocks. Natural-gas-driven nitrogen-fertilizer spikes (as in 2021–22) can wipe out a season's margin; seed, chemical, fuel, rent, and interest costs stay high even when prices fall.
• Policy dependence. A large share of demand (ethanol) and income (crop insurance, PLC/ARC) rests on federal policy; changes to the RFS, blending rules, or the Farm Bill are existential swing factors.[15][17]
• Trade and geopolitics. Exports are ~15% of use and concentrated in a few buyers; tariffs or retaliation (China, Mexico) can shut markets fast.[14]
• Land and rent risk. For renters, cash rents set a year ahead can exceed what a low-price crop can pay; for owners, farmland values (and REIT valuations) can fall if crop income and interest rates turn against them.
• Weed resistance and agronomic drift eroding the effectiveness of crop-protection products.
• Operational and structural. Grain-drying, storage, rail, barge, and port constraints; aging operators and succession gaps; tenant defaults; and, for private farms and farmland funds, illiquidity, concentration in a single tenant/region/elevator, and valuation uncertainty.
• Structural demand risk (forward-looking). Electric vehicles eroding gasoline demand would, over time, undercut the ethanol bucket that props up a large share of corn use — the biggest long-run question mark over the crop.

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10. How to invest and the outlook

You cannot buy the farm — you buy around it. Practical routes, public and private:

Public routes. First choose the exposure, then do company-specific work (segment margins, inventories, debt, capital spending, crop mix). Share price, dividend yield, and valuation multiples belong in that per-company analysis, not in a generic "corn-farming" valuation.

• The commodity itself — a corn-futures fund (e.g., CORN) or a broad ag-commodity ETF (DBA) gives direct price exposure without operating a farm. This is a leveraged bet on the price cycle, not an income holding.
• The value chain — inputs (Corteva, CF Industries, Nutrien, Deere) and buyers/processors (ADM, Bunge, Green Plains, The Andersons), or an agribusiness ETF (MOO) for the basket. These profit from the volume of farming activity more than the corn price directly, and input sellers often do best when farmers are flush — a partial hedge against grower distress.
• The land — farmland REITs (FPI, LAND) are the closest listed proxy for owning Corn Belt ground: rental income plus land appreciation, paid out as dividends; yields have run in the mid-single digits.[21]

Private routes. Diligence soil quality, drainage, water rights, historical yields, tenant balance sheets, lease terms and renewal risk, debt structure, and environmental compliance.

• Direct farmland ownership — buying acres and cash-renting to an operator; the classic private play, valued for inflation-hedging and low correlation to stocks.
• Farmland funds and platforms — institutional funds (Nuveen/TIAA, PGIM, Manulife) and crowdfunding platforms (e.g., AcreTrader, FarmTogether) let accredited investors own fractional farmland.[23]
• Direct operating or co-op equity — becoming or backing an operator, providing farm credit, or holding equity in a farmer-owned ethanol or grain cooperative.

Near-term drivers to watch (forward-looking):

1. The price/margin cycle — after a record 2025 crop pushed prices toward ~$4/bushel and many growers into losses,[11][12] the question is whether the 3% acreage cut for 2026[5] and firm feed/ethanol/export demand tighten the balance and lift prices back above break-even.
2. Ethanol and biofuel policy — EPA blending volumes for 2026–27, E15 access, and any move of corn ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel would reset the demand floor.[16]
3. The July 2025 reference-price increase — a firmer PLC/ARC safety net that partly offsets weak crop prices.[18]
4. Exports — whether record 2024/25 shipment volumes hold, given competing South American crops and trade tensions.[14]
5. Input and land costs — falling fertilizer and interest costs help margins; sticky cash rents hurt.[11]

Bottom line. Corn is the anchor crop of U.S. agriculture — enormous, strategically central, and deeply cyclical. Its growers are mostly private, family-run price-takers whose fortunes swing with weather, world prices, and Washington. Investors seeking exposure choose their spot in the chain: the volatile commodity, the concentrated input and processing companies that earn steadier margins around the farm, or the farmland itself as a long-horizon income-plus-appreciation asset. The defining near-term tension is a loss-making price trough for growers set against a firmer policy safety net and record export and ethanol demand — so the strongest long-term exposure is likely to come from efficient operators, high-quality land, strong tenants, and companies that earn margins from inputs, logistics, processing, or technology, rather than from simply betting on a higher corn price.

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Sources

1. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), 2022 Census of Agriculture — U.S. National Level Data (Volume 1, Chapter 1); corn: ~289,000 farms, 80.6M acres for grain, 13.7B bushels. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Volume_1%2C_Chapter_1_US/usv1.pdf
2. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture data release / Grain and Oilseed Production Highlights (corn crop value ~$88.5B; top commodities; large-farm share of value), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2024/02-13-2024.php
3. USDA NASS, Corn Production Down in 2024 (2024 final: 14.9B bushels; record 179.3 bu/acre; 82.9M harvested acres), 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/archive/2025/01-10-2025.php
4. USDA NASS Crop Production / World-Grain, Record US, global corn output projected in 2025 (~98M planted acres; ~186 bu/acre; ~16.7B bushels), 2025. https://www.world-grain.com/articles/21394-record-us-global-corn-output-projected-in-2025
5. USDA NASS, Corn Planted Acreage Down 3% from 2025 (2026: 95.3M planted / 87.4M harvested; stocks 5.29B bushels), 2026. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2026/06-30-2026.php
6. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS), Feed Grains Sector at a Glance (use split; top states; >95% of feed-grain output; Brazil/Argentina/Ukraine competitors), 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-grains/feed-grains-sector-at-a-glance
7. USDA NASS, Family-Owned Farms Account for ~95% of U.S. Farms (farm typology; large-scale family farms produce ~half of output value), 2025. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/archive/2025/08-19-2025.php
8. USDA ERS, Farmland Ownership and Tenure (~60% owner-operated / ~40% rented; ~53% of grain-and-oilseed acres rented), 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-ownership-and-tenure
9. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Size Standards (NAICS 111150 = $2.5M average annual receipts), 2023 — matches the ingested ground-truth statistics file. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
10. USDA ERS, Commodity Costs and Returns (corn cost-and-return components: seed, fertilizer, chemicals, fuel, labor, machinery, land), 2026. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/commodity-costs-and-returns
11. University of Illinois farmdoc daily, Cost to Produce Corn and Soybeans in Illinois — 2025 (per-acre cost; break-even), 2026. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2026/04/cost-to-produce-corn-and-soybeans-in-illinois-2025.html
12. Agriculture of America, U.S. Corn Expands Reach in 2024/25 (season-average farm price ~$4.15; value of production), 2025. https://www.agricultureofamerica.com/2025/12/09/u-s-corn-expands-reach-in-2024-25-further-growth-expected-in-2025-26/
13. National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), Extracting More from Each Bushel: Corn in Fuel & Feed (~5.5B bushels to ethanol; DDGS co-product), 2025. https://ncga.com/stay-informed/media/the-corn-economy/article/2025/12/extracting-more-from-each-bushel-corn-in-fuel-and-feed-use
14. U.S. Grains Council, U.S. Corn Exports Up Nearly 27 Percent, Breaking Record (2024/25: ~2.86B bushels / 72.5 MMT / ~$16.4B; Mexico, Japan, Colombia), 2025. https://grains.org/2025-annual-report/panels/u-s-corn-exports-up-nearly-27-percent-breaking-record/
15. Congressional Research Service (CRS), The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS): An Overview, 2025. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R43325
16. U.S. EPA, Final Renewable Fuel Standards for 2026 and 2027 (volumes; RINs; blending levers), 2026. https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard/final-renewable-fuel-standards-2026-and-2027
17. USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA), Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) & Price Loss Coverage (PLC) Overview, 2025. https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/income-support/arc-plc
18. Adams Brown, New Farm Bill Benefits: Higher Reference Prices for PLC & ARC (reference-price increase enacted July 2025), 2025. https://www.adamsbrowncpa.com/blog/new-farm-bill-benefits-include-higher-reference-prices-plc-arc-programs/
19. USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA), USDA Announces New Margin Coverage Option (MCO) for Row Crops (crop years 2026+), 2025. https://www.rma.usda.gov/news-events/news/2025/davis-california/davis-ro-usda-announces-new-margin-coverage-option-row-crops
20. U.S. EPA, Summary of FIFRA; and USDA APHIS, Revised Biotechnology (SECURE) Regulations, 2025–2026. https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-federal-insecticide-fungicide-and-rodenticide-act; https://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/regulations/secure-rule
21. SEC Form 10-K / annual-report filings for the public companies in section 4 — Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge Global, Corteva, Deere & Co., Nutrien, The Andersons, Farmland Partners, Gladstone Land (FY2025). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar
22. Corporate and cooperative profiles — Cargill (cargill.com/agriculture), CHS (chsinc.com), Land O'Lakes (landolakesinc.com), GROWMARK (growmark.com), Scoular (scoular.com), POET (poet.com), 2024–2026.
23. Institutional farmland managers — Nuveen Natural Capital (nuveen.com) and PGIM Agriculture (pgim.com), 2026; plus fractional-farmland platforms (AcreTrader, FarmTogether).
24. Iowa Capital Dispatch, Corn growers urge DOJ investigation into fertilizer industry; Land and Climate Review, How a few giant companies came to dominate global food (seed and fertilizer concentration), 2025–2026. https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/; https://landclimate.org/how-a-few-giant-companies-came-to-dominate-global-food/
25. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS definitions — Corn Farming (111150) and adjacent codes (111219, 111110/111140/111160/111191/111199, 311221, 325193, 424510, 493130, 115112–115114). https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=111150&year=2022