The Grand Prairie's other weather report
Grain Markets
Rice, soybeans, corn, and wheat pay the county's bills. This page carries the same USDA Market News numbers the elevators quote — Arkansas cash bids, rice prices, and futures settlements — collected fresh each trading day.
Today at a glance
What the crops are bringing
Best Arkansas cash bid for each crop from the latest USDA report, with the change against a year ago.
Soybeans
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Loads from the county's daily data file.
Corn
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Loads from the county's daily data file.
Soft Red Wheat
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Loads from the county's daily data file.
Rough Rice Futures
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Loads from the county's daily data file.
Prices come from the USDA Arkansas Daily Grain Bids and Weekly National Rice Summary, collected into this site once a day. If the numbers here fail to load, those two links are the same reports directly.
The board
Futures settlements
Closing prices in cents per bushel for every listed contract month — the board price a local basis bid hangs off of. Rough rice settles in dollars per hundredweight.
Futures load from the county's daily data file — or read them in the USDA report directly.
Cash grain, all of it
Arkansas elevator & mill bids
Every bid USDA reports for Arkansas, by crop — the elevators on the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers that barge our grain, the east-side country elevators, and the Stuttgart mills just across the county line.
Bid tables load from the county's daily data file.
Bid tables load from the county's daily data file.
Bid tables load from the county's daily data file.
The prairie's signature crop
Rice
Lonoke County sits in the heart of American rice country — the Stuttgart mills are twenty minutes down Highway 165. USDA reports Arkansas milled-rice prices weekly, alongside the CME rough-rice board.
The Arkansas rice table loads from the county's daily data file.
Milled vs. rough
Milled prices below are what finished Arkansas rice brings per hundredweight (100 lb) — long grain, parboiled, and the broken-kernel grades (second heads and brewers). The futures number is rough rice, straight out of the field, so the two aren't directly comparable — but they move together.
Why no local rice bid?
Most Arkansas rice moves on contracts and pool programs (Riceland and Producers, both farmer-owned) rather than daily posted bids, so USDA quotes the state's milled market weekly instead. Your buyer's number is still the one that counts.
Coffee-shop economics
How to read a grain bid
The local bid minus the futures price, in cents. A bid of "-20.00X" means twenty cents under the November ('X') contract; "+15.00U" is fifteen cents over September ('U'). Basis is the truest local signal — it's freight, storage, and how badly the buyer wants your grain, and it's the part of the price a farmer can actually shop.
Exchange shorthand for contract months: F January, G February, H March, J April, K May, M June, N July, Q August, U September, V October, X November, Z December. So "30.00Z" in a corn bid means thirty cents over December corn.
How the grain gets there and who pays: DLVD is delivered to the buyer, FOB is loaded at your end, and the letter after the dash is the mode — Truck, Rail, or Barge. Nearly every Arkansas bid is DLVD-T: you truck it to the elevator.
A small collector fetches the USDA Market News reports each afternoon and files the numbers into this site — no third-party services, no tracking, and if a report doesn't publish (markets close for holidays), the page says which day's report you're seeing. The county never edits the prices.
And a secret worth knowing: the grain growing in the homepage's prairie scene is planted by this very page. When bids run high against last year the painted field thins out; when grain is cheap, the field fills up. The art is telling you the market.
More living information