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money growing it than they can with competing crops.
• "It just pencils out better," Stover said, referring to corn's greater potential profitability.
• Much of the credit goes to new and better corn varieties, which allow yields to rise.
• "The trend line is dramatic," said Lisa Richardson, executive director of the South Dakota Corn Growers Association.
• The trend line, or general statistical pattern over time, shows that average U.S. corn yields have risen from 127 bushels per acre in 1995 to an estimated 160 bushels per acre now. Yields don't go up every year -- weather inevitably has an impact -- but the trend line is higher.
• Also contributing to the profitability in corn is farmers' growing use of technological tools such as GPS.
• "Corn fits in well with technology," said John Mages, a Belgrade, Minn., farmer.
• Corn provides sufficient return to justify the cost of new, expensive technology, which might not be the case with other crops.
• Other factors are at play in rising corn acres:
• . The United States is the world's leading corn producer and exporter, and export demand remains strong, said Todd Davis, senior economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.
• . Seeing potential higher profitability, more young farmers are turning to the crop in parts of the region where it traditionally wasn't grown.
• "A lot of young farmers, when they join the family farming operation full time, want to grow corn," said Bart Schott, chairman of the National Corn Growers Association and a Kulm, N.D., farmer.
• . More farmers are comfortable growing corn on corn, or planting corn on the same field two or more years in a row. Traditionally, farmers rotate crops on a field from year to year to combat disease and insects.
• Keith Alverson, who grows corn and soybeans near Chester, S.D., said his family farming operation plans to plant corn on 80 percent of it acres this spring. Some of the fields destined for corn this spring were planted to corn last year, too.
• . Corn thrives on heat and moisture, and much of the northern Great Plains has been unusually wet since 1993.
• Corn is not new to North Dakota, but the crop had been grown primarily in the southeastern part of the state, where the climate was conductive to the crop. Wetter conditions and better varieties have caused crop production in the state to expand north and west. Today, there's growing interest in corn in northwestern North Da

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