State agriculture officials are predicting a record corn crop this year. That's good news for corn growers who will command higher prices thanks to a drought in the midwest. Ron Heiniger is a corn specialist at North Carolina State University. He says the crop in Washington county has benefited from plenty of rain.
Ron Heiniger: Well its big, I'm six foot one and it would take two of me and a little bit more, probably about 14 foot tall is a lot of this corn.
Heiniger says yields could hit three-hundred bushels per acre and that's twice the average. He adds most of the corn grown in the state stays here.
Ron Heiniger: In North Carolina almost a hundred percent of our corn goes to feed animals, swine and poultry. I would say that it may be a fraction, a tenth of one percent ends up being used for some local ethanol production.
The higher price of corn means consumers could pay more for those products. Heiniger says North Carolina ranks around twentieth in the nation when it comes to corn production.