Iowa Farmer Today
05-13-06
Traders watch planting
By Tim Hoskins, Iowa Farmer Today
Planting progress and supply-and-demand estimates are some of the key factors
to watch in the grain markets.
Bob Wisner, Iowa State University Extension economist, says for the next
couple weeks planting progress will be a key item traders will watch.
Not only will traders be looking for planting problems, they also will look for any
potential acreage switch from the USDA Prospective Plantings report released at
the end of March.
While there have been no planting delays in Iowa, there are some concerns
developing in the Dakotas and Minnesota.
For example, North Dakota farmers have only planted 31 percent of their corn.
Last year, they had 58 percent in the ground, and they have 44 percent planted
for the five-year average. The numbers are similar in Minnesota and South
Dakota.
“It is not a crisis, yet,” Wisner says.
Minnesota’s spring wheat planting also is running behind. That could mean corn
or wheat acres might be planted to soybeans.
That increase of soybean acres will be on top of the national switch to plant more
beans in 2006. “That would suggest the chances are reduced that we will see an
increase in corn acres,” Wisner says.
The planted acres will affect supply and demand for the 2006 crop.
On May 6, the USDA released its updated balance sheets that would include
numbers for the 2006 crop.
Wisner expects the USDA to use the acreage numbers from the Prospective
Plantings report and trend-line yield of 146-146.5 bushels per acre for corn and
40-41 bu./acre for soybeans. That would produce a 10.4 billion to 10.5 billion bu.
corn crop and a 3.1 billion bu. soybean crop.
He anticipates new-crop corn demand to be 11.4 billion bu. and soybean demand
at 3 billion bu.
According to USDA’S March Grain Stocks Report, nationally there was 6.99
billion bu. of corn in storage — 4.06 billion bu. on-farm and 2.93 billion bu. offfarm stocks.
In Iowa, there was 1.54 billion bu. in storage, 950 million bu. on-farm and 589
million bu. off-farm. In the previous year, there was 1.533 billion bu. in storage
with 1 billion bu. on-farm and 533 million bu. off-farm.
On the soybean side, nationally, there was a record 1.67 billion bu. of soybeans
in storage. The 8.72 million bu. of soybeans held on-farm and the 797 million bu.
off-farm were records.
In Iowa, 369 million bu. were in storage, 200 million on-farm and 169 million bu.
off-farm. The previous year in Iowa, there was 289 million bu. stored with 165
million on the farm and 124 million off-farm.
Wisner says that led to basis pressure as the growing season starts getting
closer to and through harvest this fall.