USDA Set for First Crop Data Release Since September

By Ryan Hanrahan

Reuters’ Karl Plume and Julie Ingwersen reported that “a crop data blackout during the longest-ever U.S. government shutdown has led to the widest range of analyst estimates in a decade for corn and soybean yields, as an information vacuum at harvest time and during critical trade negotiations distorted the market for the country’s two most valuable crops.”

“The U.S. government reopened on Thursday after the 43-day shutdown. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is set to release a hotly anticipated crop report, including the government’s first estimates of the two feed crops since mid-September, before the harvest had taken shape,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “In the absence of last month’s world agriculture supply and demand estimates report, traders have relied on disparate bits of data to take positions.”

“Buyers and analysts have examined harvest estimates from private forecasters, media reports about export sales, local cash market prices, and social media posts showing overflowing grain bins in some parts of the country and ample storage space in others,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “None of this, however, gives as definitive a picture as the USDA report.”

“In September, USDA projected the largest corn and soybean yields on record and the largest harvested area for corn since the Great Depression. But in the absence of updated government data, analyst consensus has been building that the two crops’ harvest will come in smaller than projected,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “Analysts with farm lender CoBank warned of an acute crop storage shortage, but grain piles never materialized in many areas. In October, buyers in some locations began bidding up the cash price for crops, reinforcing ideas that the harvest had fallen short.”