High corn and soybean yields will bring bumper crops, traders said in anticipation of the USDA Crop Production and WASDE reports to be issued today. In surveys by Bloomberg and Reuters, analysts said the fall harvest will be bigger than thought a month ago, which will fatten U.S. inventories and hold down commodity prices for months to come.
There are sound reasons to expect the largest-ever U.S. corn crop and the third-largest soybean crop on record. Farmers planted more land to corn and soybeans than they initially planned. Thanks to favorable weather, crops are in superlative condition and some of the highest yields per acre are within reach. Traders say the corn crop could total 14.5 billion bushels, 2 percent larger than the record set in 2014, and soybeans could total 3.87 billion bushels, only 1.5 percent smaller than the record set last year.
With the record crop, the corn stockpile would expand for the fourth year in a row. At the 2.21 billion bushels predicted by traders, U.S. corn stocks at the end of the 2016/17 marketing year would be the largest since Sept. 1, 1988, when 4.26 billion bushels were in storage. That stockpile melted away within months because the United States suffered one of its worst droughts since the Dust Bowl era during 1988. A year later, there were only 1.9 billion bushels of corn in U.S. grain bins.