There is a ton of chatter about where USDA will peg acres for the major crops in their Friday Prospective plantings report. The average trade estimate is 91.332 million acres for corn, 86.169 million soybean acres, 46.915 million wheat acres, according to a poll by Reuters.
“I think you basically discount the weather issues at this point, as far as looking at the numbers we’re going to get from the USDA, here this coming week,” Dan Durcholz told AgriTalk host Chip Flory. “The one thing though, I think people miss is they don’t go back and start from a total acreage perspective and then try to figure out the mix from there. And if you remember last March, the numbers themselves were a little friendly, because we came in under expectations, but we aren’t going to manufacture more total acres being planted when you have a farm economy we have at this point.”
His estimate is roughly a half million fewer total acres than last year.
“When you look at something just short at 337 million acres, you step back and go back in 2011, 2012, 2013 we were planting almost 349 million acres. So, we’ve lost about 12 or 13 million acres,” he said. “Basically, we’ve lost that because with lower prices, marginal land just doesn’t work, folks. And when you have a farm economy on its on its heels like we have in this one you just don’t have that interest in planting marginal land.”
As to where those acres are going, Durcholz is unclear. He said it’s anyone’s guess at this point because it’s not going into any of the major crops. Some may simply be abandoned for the year, he added. Some may go into hay acres.
“The one thing I did do this year is bump my hay acreage up to about three quarters of a million and I’m kind of wondering if it may not even go higher,” he said. “After the winter we had this year where people were just astounded going, ‘I’m feeding more hay than I ever have in my lifetime,’ They weren’t around and the winters of the 80s. And we’re getting pretty low on total hay acreage I think there could be some movement back to that.”
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