Tough Week for Corn and Beans

Just when it looked like there was some hope for corn prices it was wiped out with the USDA stocks and perspective plantings report Friday morning. The USDA projected that this year U.S. farmers will plant 3.66 million acres than in 2018. With all the fertilizer that did not get applied last fall, tillage that did not get done, all the snow this winter and now flooding, plus low prices and profitability, it is hard to understand how farmers will plant a lot more corn this year?

The corn stocks number was friendly in that it was about 250 million bushel lower than last year. However, the average trade guess was 550 million lower bushel than last year so, that was bearish too. We can think the USDA is wrong with the projected acres and depending on the weather we may not see the increase of 3.9 million acres. We will not know for sure until the USDA acres report the end of June!

The bean numbers were not as bearish as corn, at least compared to expectations. The USDA projected U.S. farmers will plant 84.6 million acres of beans this year. The average trade guess was 86 million while last year farmers planted 89.2 million. The bean stocks were a record 2.7 billion bushel but that was 12 million bushel less that the average trade guess. There was some good news Friday morning with the USDA announcing a daily export sale of 816,000 metric ton of beans was sold to China for this crop season.