We are just days away from USDA’s Prospective Planting and Quarterly Grain Stocks reports. Both of those will be released on Wednesday at noon eastern.
Jom McCormick with AgMarket.net says that there has been a big build-up leading to these reports, as they will contain the much-anticipated acreage survey numbers.
“A lot of people are trending towards 93-94 million acres of corn and somewhere around 90 down to 89 million acres of beans. That’s the first key to the new crop balance sheet,” McCormick explains. “Then the wildcard is going to be the ending stocks. When you talk to producers and end-users, there does not seem to be a lot of corn leftover in the country right now. The government is counting those bushels as of March 1. They are going to release that number. That tends to be a game-changer in these markets. We’ve seen the market move limit up and limit down just based on these quarterly grain stocks.”
He says that the soybean quarterly grain stock number is easily predicted because we know what we crust and export, but the corn number is the main wildcard.