Weekly grain report

Byron Behne watches the grain markets for the Odessa Union Warehouse.

3/29/12: Apparently the markets weren’t willing to wait for a poor Friday report before breaking lower, as corn and wheat futures both tanked hard. It seems everyone’s pretty sure what the government’s going to have to say, and they weren’t willing to wait for confirmation before selling out. Exporters in Portland tucked tail and ran early, as soft white bids dropped 20 cents right off the bat, even when Chicago futures were only down a dime, then dropped an additional dime in the afternoon. Even if the report is negative, the next supply-and-demand report is less than two weeks away, and the USDA has in the past wiped out a bearish stocks number with a corresponding increase in demand before.

3/30/12: Hey, look, the USDA didn’t kill us this time! The only negative number in the report was the new-crop, corn-acreage projection at 95.9 million, which was 1.5 million over the average guess. New-crop soybeans and spring wheat acres both came in about 1.5 million acres under the average estimate. Corn stocks came in 150 million bushels under the average, which ran counter to most of the pre-report chatter, while soybeans and wheat were each 20 million bushels lower than the estimate. Consequently, May corn futures went limit-up midway through the morning trade and finished the day there as well. July futures finished half a cent off their limit so there won’t be expanded limits for corn on Monday. Soybean and wheat futures both rallied strongly on the day as well, closing up 47 and 48 cents, respectively. Suffice it to say that people will probably start taking further Chinese purchases of corn more seriously than they did earlier this week.

4/2/12: Corn and soybean futures extended their rallies from Friday while wheat futures in Chicago and Kansas City saw some profit-taking. Minneapolis futures continued their climb along with corn and soy, based off the lower-than-expected acreage projection from last week. The USDA released their first weekly crop progress reports of the spring and showed corn at 3% planted versus 2% last year and 2% on the five-year average. That pace should quicken as the weeks roll on, given current weather projections.

The overall condition of the winter wheat crop is much better than a year ago with only 12% in the poor to very poor categories versus 32% last year. There wasn't much else for news today, other than that I learned one can blow out one’s vocal cords by sneezing, I learned this because I did it over the weekend.