USDA announced late last week that they will release several important reports this month despite the lingering government shutdown. Their Crop Production and WASDE reports will be released on Friday, November 14.
Arlan Suderman, chief commodities economist at StoneX, says we’re really looking forward to seeing their production numbers.
“There are a lot of numbers in there we’re going to be looking forward to, but I think that probably the top numbers are those yield numbers for corn and soybeans for this year considering how the crop finished with dryness affecting much of the Midwest, and then disease affecting the corn crop as well.”
Without data from the federal government, the grain markets have relied on estimates from companies like StoneX to drive direction. Suderman says their customer survey results were released earlier this week. He was surprised by those results with the corn yield ticking up a tenth of a bushel from last month’s survey to 186 bpa. Soybeans dropped three tenths of a bushel to 53.6
“I wasn’t as surprised by the soybeans because we’ve heard a lot of really good yields,” explains Suderman. “We heard some good yields for corn as well but heard a lot of very disappointing yields for corn too. As we broke down the survey results, we totally blew away some records for both corn and soybeans in portions of the western Midwest.”
Also released this week were estimates from S&P Global (Platts).
“They put the corn crop at 185.5 bushels per acre and soybeans at 53 bushels per acre, so both of those within a fraction of a bushel of our StoneX customer survey,” says Suderman.
Suderman adds that it will be good to finally get information from USDA but warns it could leave us vulnerable to a big correction if its estimates vary notably from the private estimates guiding the market currently.
