Wheat market looks strong and could get stronger with end-of-the-month report agweek.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from agweek.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Plus, could grain buyers be changing purchasing patterns?
If you’re anything like me, you spent the past few days icing your neck after the whiplash from the March 31 USDA reports.
Trade estimates largely missed the mark on Wednesday’s USDA 2021 Prospective Plantings report. Lower acreage estimates for 2021 corn and soybean production sent futures contracts soaring up to each commodity’s respective daily limits - $0.25/bushel for corn and $0.70/bushel for soybeans on Wednesday, before easing slightly in Friday’s trading session.
USDA expects farmers will plant 91.1 million acres of corn, 87.6 million acres of soybeans, and 46.4 million acres of wheat. Of that total, USDA expects an 8.8% increase in winter wheat acreage with 2021 sowings at 33.1 million acres while spring wheat acreage will fall 4.2% from 2020 at the hands of higher corn and soybean profits to 11.7 million acres. That’s a principal crop acreage increase of 2% from 2020.
It was another week that corn and beans set new contract highs. We did not close the week on contract highs but technically the charts still look encouraging. There were a couple days where corn and beans dropped hard but by the end of the trading both recovered most of the losses and then moved higher the next session. it sure helped that the USDA announced a number of daily export sales of beans to China after the weekly sales were low much below the weekly average.
Tuesday morning at 11:00 am the USDA will release the Quarterly Stocks Report which will be the final yield and production for 2020 and also the January Supply Demand Report. It is one of the biggest market moving USDA reports of the year and it typically has a few surprises. The average trade guess is that it will be a friendly report with lower 2020 production and lower carry over for beans but an increase of 300 million for corn.