Soybeans prices surged this week, and with prices racing higher, some farmers may be looking to switch acres to soybeans this year. That’s as acreage estimates continue to paint a picture of uncertainty that seems to be plaguing producers in 2022.
“If we had spoken maybe a month or just at the end of last year, it would have been a no brainer, you would have looked at the board and said, ‘okay, you have to plant corn. Now, it kind of changes a little bit,” says Peter Meyer of S&P Global Platts. “We typically don’t start the year that early. But we started at the end of November, because clients were asking us, and I came out at 90 million acres of corn and 90 million acres of soybeans. And one of the reasons is not necessarily the price of nitrogen fertilizer for the corn, but really more of of the availability.”
Meyer says he’s hearing from numerous farmers who hav locked in price, but haven’t taken delivery on those inputs yet.
“We saw natural gas this week up 50 cents one day and down 50 cents today.It’s a little bit nerve racking,” says Meyer. “So as natural gas prices were going down a little bit, I kind of adjusted our acres to be 91 million corn and 89 million beans. So I do I worry a little bit that there’s going to be too many bean acres, because it’s not going to be the year where all these new crush plants for renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel start to take hold of the US crop. That’s actually another year out.”
Chip Nellinger of Blue Reef Agri-Marketing says he thinks the acreage debate could be a wild one this year, but he still doesn’t put much stock into the early acreage estimates.
“Right now you have a wide range of estimates, and it’s early,” he says. “Usually, we haven’t seen these type of estimate this early on. I’ve seen them from 87 to 88 million on the downside for corn. An University of Illinois ag economist is at 96 million corn acres. And so I think you’re probably looking at the widest variance of opinion here low to high in corn acreage that maybe we’ve ever had.”
Nellinger says he agrees with Meyer; he doesn’t think you’ll see a large shift to more corn acres for this planting season.
“I could easily see corn acres unchanged to lower. I think you could pick up a couple million bean acres. It depends on where you’re at. If you’re sitting here in the on the best ground and Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and you can raise 242 to 250 bushel per acre corn, you’re saying, ‘there’s no way I’m going to plant more bean acres.’ However, that’s a minority of the Corn Belt.”
