(IARN) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today released its Prospective Plantings and Quarterly Grain Stocks reports. Two market analysts, featured on our Network weekly, join us to discuss these reports in-depth.
USDA’s Prospective Plantings report stunned market analysts, as it estimated corn planted area at 96.99 million acres. Matt Bennett, founding partner of Ag Market.Net, speaks to the shocking prediction.
“As of March 1, producers had said, ‘We’re probably going to be heavy (on) corn this year.’ There wasn’t a clear winner, as far as ratio is concerned,” Bennett said. “I can’t say there is now, even though corn has plummeted, while soybeans have stayed steady to a little higher. As you’ve taken corn prices down, I have to think – if they ran the survey today – you’d have a drastically different outlook.”
Greg McBride, commodities broker with Allendale, Inc, said the “big corn acres” came as a surprise. He does not believe these survey-based numbers will come to fruition, due to current pricing.
“I don’t know if that will come to fruition, especially when you look at soybean prices starting to rally. (If) you get the bean price back up to 950 or 960 before planting is midday through, you could see acres start to shift. Instead of 83.5 million acres on soybeans, you could be up to 85 or 86 (million acres) and bring down these numbers on corn,” McBride said.
As for USDA’s Grain Stocks report, it appeared “neutral to friendly,” according to McBride.
“Looking at corn stocks, they were 175 million bushels lower than expectations,at 7.953 billion (bushels). That does offset a good portion of this higher corn acreage number we got,” McBride said.
Story courtesy of the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network.
