Agriculture
Grains, oilseeds, softs, and livestock: the oldest futures markets still setting the table.
How Agriculture Trades
The oldest futures markets
Agriculture is where futures trading began. The Chicago Board of Trade opened in 1848 as a meeting place for grain merchants on the banks of the Chicago River, and the "to-arrive" contracts they wrote for corn and wheat were the ancestors of every futures contract that exists today. By 1865 the CBOT had standardized contract sizes, grades, and delivery terms, invented margin, and created the template that oil, metals, and financial futures copied a century later. The grain contracts trading on CME Group screens in 2026, 5,000 bushels of corn, wheat, or soybeans quoted in cents per bushel, are direct descendants of those Civil War era agreements.
The economic problem the contracts solved has not changed: a farmer harvests once a year but the world eats every day. Someone has to carry the crop across the calendar, and futures markets price that storage, transfer the price risk, and signal to farmers each spring how much to plant. Agricultural futures remain the purest expression of what a commodity exchange is for.
What "grains", "oilseeds", and "softs" mean
The trade throws these words around as if everyone already knows them, so it is worth saying plainly. Grains are the cereal crops, every one of them a grass: corn (maize), wheat, rice, oats, barley, and sorghum. In everyday use "grain" and "cereal" are the same thing, but strictly a cereal is the edible seed of a grass, so all cereals are grains while not every grain is a cereal: the pulses (lentils, chickpeas, dry beans) are grain legumes, and the pseudocereals (quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth) are grain-like seeds of plants that are not grasses at all. In the pits the line is looser and "the grains" simply means the cereal-grass complex. Soybeans, despite being lumped in with the grains at every turn, are not a grain at all but an oilseed, a legume grown for its oil and protein. The exchange simply trades it next to the cereals, which is why CME Group calls the whole set the grains and oilseeds complex: corn, wheat, soybeans, soybean meal, soybean oil, oats, and rough rice. And yes, rice is a grain, a true cereal grass, with its own thinly traded rough rice contract on the CBOT.
Two other baskets sit beside the grains. The softs, or soft commodities, are the grown-in-the-tropics crops, coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, and orange juice, traded mostly on ICE; the word is still standard desk language, not a relic. And the meats, or livestock, are live cattle, feeder cattle, and lean hogs. So when a trader says the grains were firm but the softs were mixed, this is the map being used: cereals and oilseeds in one basket, tropical softs in another, live animals in a third.
One more pair of words cuts across all of this, sorting crops by how they are planted rather than what they are. Row crops are sown in widely spaced rows a machine can drive between to cultivate, and in the US that means corn, soybeans, cotton, and sorghum, planted each spring and worked row by row. Small grains, chiefly wheat, barley, oats, and rye, are the opposite: drilled in a dense solid stand with no rows to work between. So corn and wheat are both cereals, yet corn is a row crop and wheat is a small grain. The distinction earns its keep because the two classes compete for the same acres, and the slow productivity race between them, corn and soybeans steadily taking Plains ground from wheat, is one of the recurring stories of the grain belt.
Crop calendars, WASDE, and the basis
Every agricultural market lives on a crop calendar. Northern hemisphere corn is planted in April and May and harvested in September through November; Brazilian soybeans go in the ground in October and come off in February; the Brazilian safrinha corn crop is planted into the soybean stubble and harvested in June and July. Futures months map onto this cycle, and the spread between an old-crop month (supplies from the last harvest) and a new-crop month (supplies from the next one) is a market unto itself. In a surplus year the curve shows a carrying charge, a contango that pays commercial storers to hold grain. In a shortage the old crop inverts violently over the new crop because no amount of carry can move next year's harvest into this year's pipeline.
The monthly catalyst for the whole complex is the USDA's World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, WASDE, released around the 10th of each month. WASDE updates production, trade, and ending-stocks estimates for every major crop and country, and the stocks-to-use ratio it implies is the single most watched number in grain trading. Markets routinely move their daily limits in the minutes after release.
Most agricultural futures still settle by physical delivery: corn via shipping certificates on the Illinois waterway, coffee and cocoa in exchange-licensed warehouses, cotton in US gins' territory. Delivery keeps the futures price tethered to cash markets, and the difference between a local cash price and the futures price, the basis, is how every elevator, crusher, and exporter actually does business.
The crush and the biofuel bridge
Soybeans are rarely consumed as beans. Crushers process them into soybean meal, roughly 80 percent of the bean by weight and the world's dominant protein feed, and soybean oil, roughly 20 percent by weight but historically more than a third of the value. The gross crush margin, the value of the meal and oil minus the cost of the beans, is traded directly on CBOT as the board crush, and it is the hinge that connects three separate futures contracts into one complex.
Biofuel policy has become the bridge between agriculture and energy. Roughly 40 percent of the US corn crop goes to ethanol plants, making gasoline demand and blending economics a permanent feature of corn analysis. The US renewable diesel boom that began in 2021 rerated soybean oil from a food market into an energy market, and Indonesia's biodiesel mandates do the same for palm oil. Brazilian sugar mills swing between making sugar and making cane ethanol depending on relative prices, so raw sugar has an ethanol floor tied to Brazilian gasoline prices. When crude oil moves, the vegetable oils, sugar, and corn all listen.
Tropical concentration and the softs
The soft commodities, coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, and orange juice, carry a risk profile the grains do not: extreme geographic concentration in tropical origins. Ivory Coast and Ghana grow roughly 60 percent of the world's cocoa; Brazil produces close to 40 percent of all coffee and roughly three quarters of globally traded orange juice; Vietnam dominates robusta. When weather or disease hits one of these origins there is no other hemisphere to compensate, which is why the softs produce the most violent bull markets in commodities. Cocoa proved it in 2024, breaking a 47-year-old record within weeks and trading above $12,000 per tonne, and arabica coffee followed in 2025 with 50-year highs.
The El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle is the common thread. El Nino years bring drought to Southeast Asia and West Africa and excess rain to South America; La Nina years dry out Argentina and the southern US Plains. A single ENSO swing can move cocoa, coffee, sugar, palm oil, and the South American grain crops in the same season.
Livestock: the slow cycle
Cattle and hogs trade on biology rather than weather. A heifer retained for breeding today does not produce a market-ready steer for nearly three years, so the cattle cycle runs roughly a decade from herd liquidation to rebuilt supply, and the US herd contraction that began in 2019 delivered record beef and futures prices through 2024 and 2025. Hogs cycle faster, under a year from breeding decision to slaughter, but the global swing factor is China, which raises roughly half the world's pigs; the African swine fever epidemic that destroyed a large share of the Chinese herd in 2018 and 2019 reshuffled world meat trade for years. Live cattle futures still deliver physical animals; lean hogs settle in cash against an index of carcass prices, a design that has made the contract a pure bet on the US cash hog market.
Fact Sheets
The biggest crop on earth, feeding livestock, fueling cars, and anchoring the oldest futures market in the world. Americans call it corn; most of the world calls it maize.
The bread grain whose price is now set on the Black Sea, not the Great Plains.
The oilseed superpower crop: grown in the Americas, crushed everywhere, and bought above all by China.
The protein that feeds the world's chickens and pigs, priced in Chicago and shipped from Rosario.
The cooking oil that renewable diesel turned into an energy commodity.
Two species, two exchanges, one drink: the premium bean that broke a 50-year price record, and the hardy one that powers the world's instant coffee.
Raw in New York, refined in London, and priced off Brazilian cane mills that can make fuel instead.
The fiber that clothed the industrial revolution and once spiked to prices unseen since the American Civil War.
The chocolate bean that quadrupled in 2024 and shattered a record that had stood since 1977.
The world's biggest vegetable oil, priced in ringgit in Kuala Lumpur and burned increasingly as Indonesian biodiesel.
The breakfast-table future that went vertical as disease wiped out Florida's groves.
Record beef prices on the smallest American herd since 1951, with a flesh-eating parasite closing the border.
America's pork benchmark, cash-settled against carcasses, with China's vast hog herd as the global swing factor.
The staple food for more than half the planet, grown and eaten in Asia, and so thinly traded that one country's export ban can reorder the world.
The world's fifth cereal and a staple for half a billion people, yet invisible in Western supermarkets: a drought-proof grain with no futures, priced as a corn substitute and sold mostly to China.
The world's fourth cereal and one of its oldest crops, split between the feed trough and the beer glass, with a thin futures market and a trade flow that runs through China and the Gulf.
The cereal the horse built and the engine destroyed, now the smallest contract in the Chicago grain pit, kept alive by breakfast, by rotations, and lately by a carton of oat milk.
The bread grain of the poor northern soils, halved and halved again since 1961, now fed to pigs, sown to be killed as a cover crop, distilled into whiskey, and priced without a futures market anywhere on earth.
A drought-proof root that feeds roughly 800 million people across the tropics, poisonous until processed, born in the Amazon and now the calorie backbone of Africa, with no futures market and a trade that runs from Thailand to China.
A tropical tree crop tied to cars and global trade, irreplaceable in heavy-duty and aircraft tires, and squeezed by disease and aging plantations into a multi-year high.
One of the largest crops in America by acreage, and almost the only one with no futures market.
The world's biggest non-cereal food crop, sold mostly on processor contracts, and so resistant to a futures market that its one famous contract ended in the largest delivery default in US history.
The perishable foundation of all dairy, priced in regulated US classes and discovered globally at a twice-monthly New Zealand powder auction.
The biggest single use of milk, and the price that sets what American dairy farmers earn.
Concentrated milk fat, dominated invisibly by Indian ghee and prone to violent European shortages.
The world's most exported fruit, run by an oligopoly on fixed-price contracts, with no futures market and a single clone facing an incurable disease.
"Green gold": a single-variety fruit with no futures market, dominated by Mexico, spiked by the Super Bowl, and now flowing from Kenya to China.
A Mediterranean crop concentrated in Spain, with no live futures market and a 2024 drought spike that tripled prices.
A heterogeneous luxury crop with no true futures exchange, where "wine futures" means buying Bordeaux in the barrel and the secondary market is a fine-wine index.
The alcohol that actually trades: corn and sugarcane distilled into fuel, blended into the world's gasoline, and hedged on two continents.
Dozens of distinct crops with no global exchange, dominated by India, and the rare farm goods whose only real futures trade in cumin, coriander, turmeric, and cardamom.
Almonds to hazelnuts: a set of high-value orchard crops, each concentrated in one or two origins, and none with a futures market.
One of the CME's founding futures contracts, long since delisted, now a cash market whose price is set by bird flu.
The world's largest and cheapest meat, grown in six weeks by vertically integrated giants, and priced by the cut rather than on an exchange.
A farmed premium protein, half of it from Norway, and one of the very few fish with a real futures market.
Two markets in one fish: a five-million-tonne canned commodity built on skipjack, and a luxury sashimi trade where a single bluefin can sell for millions at a Tokyo auction. Neither has a futures market.
The world's most consumed drink after water, dominated by China and India, and sold the old way: by auction, with no futures market.
A high-value, intensely perishable category, strawberries the giant and blueberries the boom, sold by contract and brand with no futures, and quietly controlled by proprietary genetics.
Among the largest crops on earth by tonnage, almost none trade on a futures exchange, and onions are the one commodity the US has banned outright.
The most perishable thing in world trade, cleared on a descending-price clock in the Netherlands, and the birthplace of the first speculative bubble.
The oilseed Canada invented and named, crushed for cooking oil, animal feed, and now biodiesel, with its own futures in Winnipeg and Paris.
The fourth of the big four vegetable oils, pressed from seeds not petals, and so dominated by Ukraine and Russia that a single war moved the world's cooking-oil price.
Softwood two-by-fours, the most volatile building material, whose 2020-2021 moonshot added tens of thousands of dollars to the price of a house.
Two crops in one plant: the only fibre that becomes linen, grown in a damp European coastal belt, and a minor oilseed grown on the dry steppe, with no real futures market for either.
The rope-and-sailcloth fibre that built navies, was banned for looking like its intoxicating cousin, came back for a molecule nobody could sell, and still has no futures market.
The original performance fibre, sold by auction in Australia and tracked by the Eastern Market Indicator: a market synthetics shrank to a premium niche and a 1991 stockpile collapse nearly destroyed.
Bees are working livestock whose biggest paycheck is pollination, not honey: a no-futures market shadowed by cheap sugar on price and by collapsing colonies on supply.
Wood turned to fibre: a global commodity bigger than lumber, with Brazilian eucalyptus pulp, Nordic softwood, a Shanghai futures contract, and a paper market splitting between dying print and booming packaging.