Bushel (bu)

The bushel (abbreviated bu) is the standard unit you will see next to grain prices on commodity data pages. It is a volume measure, not a weight measure — though in practice different grains have standardized weight equivalents. One bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds, one bushel of soybeans also 60 pounds, and one bushel of wheat 60 pounds. These "test weight" conventions are fixed by the US grain trade and are worth memorizing to avoid confusion.

Standard futures contracts on US exchanges cover 5,000 bushels per contract. So if a corn futures contract is quoted at, say, 450 cents per bushel (a hypothetical example), the full contract value would be 5,000 × $4.50 = $22,500. This is why reading commodity units and contracts carefully matters: the quoted price is per bushel, but a position's total exposure is multiplied by the contract size.

Prices are conventionally quoted in cents per bushel rather than dollars, so a quote of 600 means $6.00 per bushel. This trips up many first-time readers of grain data. Internationally, grain prices are sometimes converted to US dollars per metric tonne for comparison, but the exchange-traded benchmark remains cents per bushel. Understanding the unit is the first step to making sense of any move shown in the percentage-change columns on a data page.