Ethanol boom leads to largest corn plantings in 63 years

DES MOINES--Farmers saw the high prices for corn and switched even more acreage to the crop this year than experts first predicted.

The U.S. Agriculture Department reported today that farmers planted 92.9 million acres of corn this year, 19 percent more than last year and 3 percent more than the USDA had projected in March.

This is the most corn that U.S. farmers have planted since 1944.

In turn farmers planted fewer acres of soybeans in the Midwest and cotton in the South.

Iowa growers followed the trend, planting an estimated 14.3 million acres of corn this year, 400,000 acres above the March projection and 1.7 million more acres than they planted a year ago.

Soybean acreage in Iowa fell from 10.2 million in 2006 to 8.8 million this year.

Corn prices shot up last year, driven by the demand for grain to make fuel ethanol.

"The producer has spoken," said Don Roose, president of U.S. Commodities, a research and brokerage firm in West Des Moines.

"It was an easy situation to look at the profitability in corn versus soybeans in the winter when you were deciding what to plant and he did," Roose said.

He said the drop in soybean acreage will increase soybean prices, squeezing the profits of biodiesel plants and other processors who rely on soybeans.

Nationally, farmers planted 64.1 million acres of soybeans this year, down from 75.5 million last year. Cotton acreage plunged 28 percent this year, the USDA said.