USDA Releases Uneventful February WASDE Report

The USDA released its February WASDE (World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates) report Wednesday morning.

Dan Basse is president of AgResource Company in Chicago.

"About as boring as they get, and that's not unusual for February," he said. "They cut the U.S. soybean end stocks by 25 million bushels by raising crush a like amount and made no other changes of substance. In corn, in the United States, they left the balance sheet the same at 1.54 billion bushels. Wheat, they actually raised end stocks 20 million bushels, citing a lower export profile by 20 million bushels."

Basse says they did make some changes internationally.

"They cut the Brazilian soybean crop five million metric tons, now 134. Three million metric tons below last year and then they made reductions also by one and half million tons to Argentina and 2.2 million metric tons to Paraguay. All combined now in the last two reports, USDA's cut about an 18 million metric tons of soybeans for about 800 million bushels. That is supportive to the soybean market. Other than that, we're going to be looking at South American weather and whether China continues to be an aggressive buyer of U.S. soybeans going forward."