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USDA reports confirm a poor corn crop. Relative to trend-line yield expectations, I consider 2012 one of the five worst years in the last century. We started the current crop year with the lowest corn supply in a decade. On the demand side, something has to give, and the pace of exports has plummeted. But feed and ethanol demand is surprisingly resilient. The net result is a projection for even tighter ending corn stocks by next summer....More

U.S. feed grain supplies for 2012-2013 are projected slightly higher with small increases forecast for corn and sorghum production and higher projected corn imports. Forecast corn production for 2012-2013 is raised 19 million bushels with a 0.3-bu. increase in the corn yield to 122.3 bu./acre. Total U.S. oilseed production for 2012-2013 is projected at 91.4 million tons, up 3.2 million from last month due to higher soybean, peanut and cottonseed production. Soybean production is forecast at 2.971 billion bushels, up 111 million from last month. The soybean yield is forecast at 39.3 bu./acre, up 1.5 bu. as several states show the benefit of late-season rainfall....More

Corn export shipments were 15 million bushels for the past week and new sales were only 6 million bushels. Total shipments of 83 million bushels for the marketing year are 37% behind last year and sales are down nearly 50%. What is wrong with U.S. corn? Strong dollar? High cost? Aflatoxin? Is feed wheat more abundant and lower priced? Competition from typical or atypical sources? With short supplies you would think buyers would be grabbing up whatever they could before it runs out....More

The U.S. soy industry’s relationship with its third-largest importer of whole soybeans had a close call this summer. One small shipment of U.S. soybeans was found to carry residue of a fungicide, at a level higher than allowed by Japanese law....More

Prices over the past two months for corn and the past month for soybeans appear to be in the classic “short-crop, long-tail” pattern where prices peak early in a year of sharply lower production and then decline in the post-harvest period as the smaller supplies get rationed and production rebounds in the following year, according to University of Illinois Agricultural Economist Darrel Good....More

“What happened? Corn futures went up 25¢ so I sold a contract. But the basis dropped 20. That stinks. Am I getting the shaft?”...More

A magazine editor once told me that she could take some of my educational articles that I wrote 30 years ago, rerun them today and other than changing the prices, no one would know the difference. She’s correct. Markets change and prices change – but people don’t. The human psychology element of marketing is the same now as it was 30 years ago....More

A larger percentage of the U.S. corn grain acreage was harvested in August this year than is typically the case. The availability of large, new-crop corn supplies during the last month of the previous marketing year makes it more difficult to anticipate the magnitude of old- crop stocks on Sept. 1, according to University of Illinois Agricultural Economist Darrel Good....More