An earlier piece on this site looked at whether an ethanol distillery could profit by trading maize to poultry and feed mills, and found it pays only in a glut. That analysis used all-India and Uttar Pradesh prices. This one runs the same tests state by state, for maize and for rice, the two grains India’s ethanol programme now leans on most. It asks four things of each state: where its price sits against the national average, which months are cheapest and dearest, how often prices have dipped sharply, and whether buying in a given month and holding for six months would have made money.

How much to trust it. All prices and arrivals come from Agmarknet’s public dashboard API: monthly weighted-average prices in rupees per quintal and arrivals in tonnes, by state, from January 2019 to 23 October 2026. The all-India figure is this blog’s arrival-weighted average of state prices. Only states with at least 60 months of prices and 5,000 tonnes of arrivals in the past year are shown. Agmarknet’s coverage widened when its new portal went live in November 2025, so recent arrival totals are not comparable with earlier years. Rice prices mix many varieties and grades, so a state’s rice price partly reflects what kind of rice it trades, not only where it is. Broken rice, the grade distilleries buy, is reported too thinly (usually one or two states a month) to analyse by state.

Where maize is cheap today

In October 2026 the all-India maize price was Rs 2,202 a quintal, 19% above its average over the previous 12 months, as prices recovered from the glut of the 2025-26 winter. The states that grow most of the crop for sale were cheapest: Madhya Pradesh, which accounted for 7.4 million of the 16.1 million tonnes reported to Agmarknet over the past year, sat Rs 131 below the national figure, and Rajasthan Rs 119 below. Southern states that consume maize for poultry feed but grow less of it were dearest.

The spread, about Rs 510 a quintal from Madhya Pradesh to Tamil Nadu, is wider than the roughly Rs 400 a quintal it costs to truck grain that far, at about Rs 3 a tonne-kilometre. That gap is the opening a trader moving grain from the central states to the southern poultry belt works with. It also tracks where feed demand sits: the dearer southern states are home to major poultry clusters such as Namakkal in Tamil Nadu and the area around Hyderabad.

Maize’s cheap season follows the harvest around the map

Averaging each calendar month over 2019 to 2025 shows when each state is cheap relative to its own norm. A value of 0.90 means that month typically runs 10% below the state’s average.

Three calendars stand out.

• The kharif belt (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka) is cheapest in October and November as the monsoon crop arrives, and dearest in July and August before it. The swing from cheapest to dearest month is 15–19% in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka, and 30% in Maharashtra.
• The spring-crop north (Punjab, Uttar Pradesh) is cheapest in June and July, when the zaid crop is harvested. Punjab’s swing is the widest of any large state at 45%; Uttar Pradesh’s is 12%, with December the dearest month.
• Tamil Nadu is cheapest in January and dearest in July, on its own rabi harvest.

For a buyer who can move grain between states, that staggering matters more than any single state’s cycle. There is a harvest somewhere in almost every quarter. Telangana, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are flatter, with swings of 7–10%.

Rice moves within a narrow band

Rice swings 5–9% across the year in the main states, typically cheapest around January after the kharif harvest and dearest between August and October. Large public procurement at minimum support prices and the Food Corporation of India’s stocks hold the market in a band. Neither Uttar Pradesh nor West Bengal recorded a single month since 2020 in which rice fell 15% below its 12-month average. Karnataka was the exception, with 11 such months, the latest in December 2025.

State price levels for rice differ widely: Uttar Pradesh traded about Rs 1,090 a quintal below the national figure in October 2026 and Maharashtra about Rs 1,680 above. Much of that reflects the mix of varieties each state’s markets report rather than a tradeable gap in the same grade. The national rice figure also jumped to 24% above its 12-month average in October 2026, led by Karnataka (37% above). That is large for rice and may partly reflect changes in the varieties reported, so it is worth confirming with grade-wise prices before reading it as a market move. For distilleries, the rice that matters is FCI’s surplus rice, priced by the government at Rs 2,390 a quintal for 2026-27, and broken rice, for which Agmarknet’s coverage is too thin to compare states.

Seven years of prices and volumes, state by state

The panels below plot each state’s monthly price from January 2019 to October 2026 against the all-India price, in grey, with the tonnes reaching its mandis each month as bars underneath. Prices share one scale across all panels, so a line above the grey one is a state that pays more. Volumes are scaled to each state’s own peak month, which is printed in the panel, so the bars show timing rather than size between states.

For maize, every state followed the same broad price path: a low in 2020, a climb through 2023 and 2024 as ethanol demand grew, the 2025-26 winter glut and a recovery into October 2026. What differs is the level, and the timing of supply. Madhya Pradesh gets about 80% of its arrivals between October and January, and its busiest month on record was December 2025 at 1.7 million tonnes, during the glut. Uttar Pradesh gets about 60% of its arrivals between June and August, peaking at 1.3 million tonnes in June 2026. Rice rose more steadily, with Maharashtra’s finer varieties far above the national line and Uttar Pradesh below it.

Holding grain has not paid, in any state

For each state and month since January 2023, the test buys at that month’s price and sells six months later, after warehouse rent of Rs 10 a quintal a month, interest at 10.5% a year and shrinkage of 0.1% a month.

A dip month is one where the price was at least 15% below the state’s trailing 12-month average. Carry is tested for buy months from January 2023 to April 2026, so that a six-month sale price exists. This blog’s calculation on Agmarknet data.

Among the states in the table, holding paid in between 15% and 38% of months. Across all 20 state-and-grain pairs analysed, the average result was negative in every one; broken rice is left out because its data is too thin. For the main states the average loss was Rs 135–212 a quintal for maize and Rs 87–370 for rice. The seasonal patterns above are real, but in most years they are smaller than six months of storage and interest, and the 2024-25 run-up followed by the 2025-26 glut wiped out what was gained in between. For maize the dips cluster: most states last recorded one between February and March 2026, during the national glut. Uttar Pradesh’s came later, in May 2026, and Tamil Nadu’s in June.

What it means for buyers

For a feed mill or distillery, the data argues for buying where and when the harvest is, rather than storing. In practice that means sourcing from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in October and November, from Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in June and July, and from Tamil Nadu in January. Stockpile only in a genuine glut, when a state’s price is 15% or more below its 12-month average. Those months come in clusters, a few years apart. For rice the case for storage is weaker still: the band is narrow, dips are rare outside Karnataka, and distilleries’ rice comes mainly from FCI at a fixed price.

Sources and method. Agmarknet dashboard API (agmarknet.gov.in; endpoint api.agmarknet.gov.in/v1/dashboard-data, state-wise price and arrival report): Maize (commodity 4), Rice (3) and Broken Rice (244), January 2019 to 23 October 2026. Weighted-average prices in Rs per quintal; arrivals in metric tonnes. All-India averages, the seasonal index, dip flags and the carry test are this blog’s calculations, available as a spreadsheet with every step as a formula. FCI rice price for ethanol: OMSS-D 2026-27 as reported by ChiniMandi. eNAM trade data was unavailable (its server returned errors) and is not used. This post is AI-assisted analysis of public data, not investment advice.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.