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• "That's why everybody has to keep their pencils pretty sharp on the corn versus beans equation," said Darrel Good, an agriculture and consumer economics professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.
• A popular rule of thumb has been for farmers to plant more soybeans if the price is at least 2½ times that of corn. Currently, the market prices soybeans for delivery next November at $11.23 per bushel. The comparable corn price is $4.54. That puts the soybean price at 2.47 times corn price.
• Many farmers have been planting more corn in the last few years because prices were so high.
• Corn demand began increasing in 2008 as ethanol production boomed. Prompting some farmers to put land back into production that had been enrolled on conservation programs and to pull out fences and take down barns to clear additional acres to plant.
• More than 97.4 million acres were devoted to corn in 2013, which was the most since 1936.
• That meant more corn in prime corn and soybean growing states, including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota and Ohio. The high prices also prompted farmers to gamble on corn in states with soil less suited for the crop, such as Kansas, portions of Nebraska, North Dakota, and parts of South Dakota.
• Some farmers planted corn repeatedly, a change from the practice of planting about half their land in corn and soybeans, then rotating crops between fields from year to year. Soybeans naturally deposit nitrogen into the soil and corn removes it, so alternating between the two crops provides farmers with free nitrogen the corn needs.
• Rotating the two crops also provides benefits in weed and insect control and can help reduce pesticide and herbicide costs. Farmers who plant corn fields where corn was just grown must buy nitrogen fertilizer to put on the soil. However with high corn prices, farmers could justify the extra cost and many strayed from the optimum rotation.
• Grant Kimberly, who farms nearly 4,000 acres with his father in central Iowa, said about 10 percent of the fields on his family's farm remained unplanted last year because of too much moisture. The family hasn't decided what to plant this year, but current factors favor beans.
• "Overall we're shifting our rotation back to where we want to be, closer to 60 percent corn and 40 percent soybeans. We have been more of a 70/30 in the past few years," he said.
• Wayne Fredericks, who farms nearly 1,000 acres in northeast Iowa near Osage,

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