The USDA Acreage and Quarterly Stocks Reports are generally the biggest market movers of the year, but this year the surprise was how the report turned out to be a non-event.
USDA pegged corn acreage at 95.2 million acres, which was in line with expectations, and down just 123,000 acres from the March intentions.
Matt Bennett, AgMarket.Net, says it looks like some of the prevent plant acres in the East and South were offset by more acres getting planted in the western Corn Belt with an early spring.
“There are folks in the eastern Corn Belt, Ohio and down through the Delta, who lost some acres, there’s no question about it. A lot of folks felt like, well, maybe that was going to trump things and pull acres down a little,” he explains. “Our team felt like with all the folks we’d talked to, in northern Illinois, Iowa, into Nebraska and through both Dakotas, we were looking at a fair amount of additional corn acreage here and there. Clearly those offset one another.”
USDA reported corn plantings declined by 50,000 acres in Ohio, 100,000 acres each in Illinois and Minnesota, 200,000 acres in Kansas and 300,000 acres in Nebraska. Meanwhile, increases of 100,000 acres were reported for Michigan, Missouri and South Dakota, while North Dakota rose 50,000 acres.
Farmers planted 4.61 million more acres than in 2024, but Bennett says the corn market is actually breathing a sigh of relief as the economics clearly favored even more corn acres.
“There were folks out there tossing out some awfully big acreage numbers or just whisper numbers and certainly seed sales have shown that,” he says.
Soybean acreage was at 83.38 million, again in line with pre-report guesses. That’s down 115,000 from March, which was no surprise with negative margins, fear of China tariffs and a big South American crop.
Bennett says soybean acreage was down in 25 of the 29 major production states: “This last winter, a lot of folks felt like this bean market, especially with a big Brazilian crop, was going to go to $10 and below and stay there.”
Total wheat acreage was only up 40,000 from estimates but up 128,000 from March at 45.478 million. That’s down 1% from 2024. Farmers planted 33.3 million acres of winter wheat, 2.11 million acres of durum and 10 million of other spring wheat.
Cotton acreage came in above estimates at 10.1 million, as it was too early for prevent plant acres due to excessive rain and flooding to show up in this report. That number is still down 10% from 2024.
Quarterly stocks came in close to expectations for all the grains but did confirm larger stocks for wheat at 851 million bushels, up over 150 million from a year ago. Soybeans were at 1.008 billion bushels, up 38 million from 2024.
However, corn stocks at 4.64 billion bushels is down around 350 million from last year confirming strong demand, according to Bennett.
“What that does is it says, hey, what we all thought was the case as far as disappearance was concerned, actually is the case. We didn’t get any bearish surprises here. Basis and spreads would have tried to tell us that we would get a bearish surprise,” he remarks.
Still, Bennett says this doesn’t jive with how low old crop corn prices are. He says this number and continued strong exports suggests old crop corn ending stocks at only 1.3 billion bushels so he hopes the market and the funds will finally recognize that in the July WASDE.
