April is winding down and John Olsson has nothing to show for his plan to grow 650 acres of corn but unplanted seeds and empty fields.

The Illinois farmer says that, last year at this time, he was about finished planting corn, but this wet, cool spring that’s holding him up isn’t making him nervous just yet.

“If we started today, we’d be in good shape,” said Olsson, who grows soybeans and corn near New Berlin, about 15 miles west of Springfield. “We’re not starting today.”

Across the Corn Belt, farmers are mostly waiting rather than planting.

The weather has kept farmers from planting any corn in Ohio, Indiana and Iowa, the nation’s biggest corn grower, the USDA said earlier this week. Just 4 percent of the U.S. crop has been planted, compared to an average of 17 percent at this point the previous five years.

In Illinois, the country’s No. 2 corn state, only an estimated 1 percent of the expected crop is in the field, according to the USDA. Last year at this time the figure was 9 percent, and the previous five years farmers, on average, had almost a third of their crop in the ground by the third week in April.

The prospects for this year’s corn crop have taken on greater significance than usual for the country.

Prices have been driven to record highs by the demand for corn to feed livestock in emerging economies overseas and to create ethanol at home. And high corn prices are part of the food-price inflation that’s dragging on the economy.

When the USDA forecast last month that U.S. farmers will plant 86 million acres of corn this year — a huge crop by historical standards but 8 percent smaller than last year — prices immediately shot up.

And since then, any time a long-range weather forecasts calls for more rain in the Corn Belt, prices have spiked similarly, said grains analyst Elaine Kub, who works for agriculture-market information company DTN.

Any kink in this year’s crop could push prices even higher.

But it’s far too early to anticipate any kind of problem, according to University of Illinois agronomy professor Emerson Nafziger.

“We’re still in April,” he said. “When the calendar turns to May, then people really start to get concerned.”

Even then, he said, farmers still would have a pretty good chance to produce a good crop. The hybrid corn seeds planted by most farmers mature relatively quickly once planted, meaning that even if they’re planted well into May, the plants should be up and growing in time to take advantage of the summer heat. That period and how much heat corn plants soak up is a key factor in determining how much corn they’ll produce.

May also is a benchmark for the grain markets, DTN’s Kub said.