USDA’s 101st Annual Agricultural Outlook Forum will be held Feb. 27-28 near Washington, DC, with the theme of “Meeting Tomorrow’s Challenges, Today.” The look at corn and soybean acreage under current conditions will be among the key focal points during the event, but it will also be key to see how USDA paints an export outlook with so much uncertainty surrounding tariffs and trade.
Farm Journal Washington correspondent Jim Wiesemeyer says USDA produced its budget-related figures last fall that were part of the agricultural projections publication that was released ahead of the conference.
“It is not clear how much the figures released next week will change relative to the initial budget-related outlooks,” Wiesemeyer says.
We interviewed Seth Meyer, chief economist with USDA, during the Top Producer Summit last week. He provided a preview for the Ag Outlook Forum, saying he will talk about farm income margins for crops and livestock, which are two very different stories. Meyer says one of the challenging parts is trying to forecast the trade picture, even with the uncertainty around tariffs. USDA will also look at the impact of foreign animal diseases on the livestock sector during the Ag Outlook Forum this week.
What’s Meyer’s overall outlook on 2025? It’s a tad more positive than 2024.
“This is a strange statement to appear bullish, but maybe we’ve hit the bottom. Six months ago, things were getting pretty bad, pretty fast. Hopefully we’ve hit a bottom on some of this and seen a little bit of rebound and maybe a little bit better on demand, especially on corn, as we see a little bit of a rebound. So, I’m kind of hopeful that maybe things aren’t going to get a bunch worse on the crop side,” Meyer says.
While he’s more optimistic, Meyer points out here are still a plethora of challenges in the ag economy, especially with tight margins on the crops side.
“For things like cotton, we’ve continued to see price erode,” Meyer says. “We started at an 80 cent forecast. We’re now down to 64.5 cents, and 80 cents wasn’t going to make you a bundle of money at the time either. So I think we go through these periods of crop prices where input prices are slower to correct. And it makes a really disruptive time as that adjustment happens, and we’re in that disruptive time.”
The Difficulty of Forecasting Trade
USDA analysts in the forecasts released later this week are not expected to make any assumptions on the impact of potential tariffs on U.S. agricultural commodities. For the WASDE report, the analysts use the policy actions that are in effect at the time and their outlooks presented next week should follow that track.
“We will produce an outlook which is policy in place,” Meyer says. “So, while there’s been a lot of talk about tariffs, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs on Canada and tariffs on Mexico, right now, we don’t have anything in place. So we’ll do an outlook absent that.”
Meyer says the team at USDA is in the middle of building tools to show the possible impacts of tariffs on trade.
“We’re making sure we have the tools in place to understand what the impact on agriculture is from such actions. So we are prepared internally to do the calculations necessary to support the secretary of agriculture,” Meyer said.
2025 Acreage in Focus
This is USDA’s first glimpse at acreage. Even though it’s not the survey-based estimate, which will be released at the end of March, it’s still the market’s first 2025 acreage data to digest. While Meyer couldn’t reveal any early acreage projections, he acknowledged the trend for more corn acres this year, but says soybeans are also trying to compete for acres.
Meyer wasn’t able to give his acreage estimates, but Dan Basse, founder and president of AgResource Company, says if USDA is aggressive and pencils a 94 million acre number on corn, that could be bearish to the market.
“We’re at 93 million acres at AgResource Company, and I just got back from a conference in Jonesboro in the Delta, and I was just shocked how many Delta farmers want to plant corn and abandon cotton and rice,” Basse told U.S. Farm Report. “We will do a survey again in the middle of March, but our surveys are pointing upward, and I wouldn’t be surprised by 94 million plus at some point.”
Arlan Suderman, chief commodities economist for StoneX Group says his current estimates aren’t quite to 94 million, but close.
“Right now we’re at 93.5 million acres, which is up about 3 million from last year,” Suderman said during the live taping of U.S. Farm Report during the Top Producer Summit. “But I have an alternate scenario I’m using right now, which is 95.5 million acres, which would be 5 million acres, essentially, higher than last year. We’re going to do another survey and collect more data right around March 1 when USDA does, because we’re just hearing enough of the feedback from the seed industry about how big their corn seed sales are versus their soybean seed sales. And so if there’s a bias to it, it’s to the upside right now.”
All Ag Outlook Forum sessions will be streamed on a virtual platform this week.
