Grain > Commentary > 1-19-2024

1/19/2024

Jan 19, 2024

A solid effort was made for a small run higher in corn and soybeans to end the week.  Throughout the overnight session and the first half of the day trade, corn and soybeans had the look of trying to reverse higher out of the short-term trends but the finish left something to be desired.  The USDA made a flash sale announcement this morning for 297,000 tonnes of soybeans for delivery to China during the 2023/24 marketing year.  Trade was also given some confidence to hit the buy button following a strong weekly export sales report.  Corn sales slightly outperformed trade expectations with 1.251 mln tonnes of corn sold last week.  Soybeans were on the upper end of expectations with 781k tonnes sold.  This was exactly what we needed following a couple short holiday weeks that included some less-than-impressive sales.  It should be expected that any type of significant rally will be met with some serious selling from the farmer and basis will get defensive in a hurry.  March corn spreads tightened even further today and it appeared some corn export business may finally be getting completed.

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1/12/2026
Jan 12, 2026
Well, the USDA report had a bit of a surprise today and not in a good way.  Not only did they increase the 2025 corn yield, from 186.0 to 186.5, they also increased Harvest Acres from 90 million to 91.3 million.  That raised the total corn production to 17.021 billion, up an additional 269 million bushels from their previous estimate.  U.S. Ending Stocks are now estimated at 2.227 bbu, vs. 2.209 in Dec.  Report trade guesses were at 1.97 bbu.
11/14/2025
Nov 14, 2025
It was USDA report day today and overall, it was bearish for both corn and beans.  Corn Yield was only reduced by .7 bpa down to 186 bpa.  The market was expecting closer to 184 bpa.  Corn production is estimated at 16.752 billion vs 16.814 billion in September.  They raised exports 100 million, which is debatable, but possible.  Ending stocks on corn were estimated at 2.154 billion bushels, which is up 44 million from September and about 29 million more than the market expected. 
9/12/2025
Sep 12, 2025
USDA report day.  Corn and beans were trading higher pre-report on thoughts of a reduction to yields.  Well....we got what we were thinking but the USDA decided to throw a twist into the mix.  The 25/26 corn yield decreased slightly less than expected by 2.1 bu to 186.7 bpa, but they gave us the largest planted acreage shift on this report in at least the last 20 years (+1.4 mil acres) spurred an increase in production to 16,814 mbu.  25/26 ending stocks were slightly lowered by 7 mbu to 2,110 mbu.