Farmers might still harvest the largest U.S. soybean crop ever, even if a rainy spring kept them from planting as much of the oilseed as they had intended. Meanwhile, growers planted slightly more corn than expected, despite high prices and tight supplies for fertilizer and pesticides, reported the Agriculture Department on Thursday.
Corn and soybeans are the two most widely planted crops in the nation, covering just more than half of the 316.3 million acres planted to two dozen “principal” crops, which include wheat, rice, and cotton as well as hay, potatoes, and peanuts. Corn and soybeans are used as rations in meat, poultry, and dairy production, as ingredients in food, and as feedstocks for making biofuels.
Instead of a record-high 91 million acres — their goal earlier this year, as the planting season neared — soybean growers sowed 88.3 million acres, said the USDA’s annual Acreage report. That was 1 percent more than in 2021 but 2.7 million acres less than the 91 million they planned in March. Corn plantings of 89.9 million acres were 400,000 acres larger than growers indicated in late winter.
Spring planting delays were worst in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota, said the USDA. Soybean plantings in North Dakota, for example, were estimated at 5.9 million acres, down 16 percent from the 7 million acres growers indicated they would plant in the Prospective Plantings report on March 31. Soybean plantings in Minnesota were 150,000 acres below what growers planned in March. The 5.9 million acres of corn planted in South Dakota were 300,000 fewer acres than intended.
“That upper midwestern tier,” said agricultural economist Scott Irwin of the University of Illinois. “That’s really the big story.”
Based on normal weather and the USDA’s projected yield of 51.5 bushels an acre — the highest ever — the soybean harvest would be 4.5 billion bushels, compared to the mark of 4.435 billion bushels set in 2021. A record 11.2 million acres of soybeans were planted in Illinois, the No. 1 soy state.
The corn harvest could be the fourth largest on record, at 14.5 billion bushels, based on the USDA’s projected harvest area and yields. The USDA projected a yield of 177 bushels an acre, the same as the record set last year.
During a webinar, Irwin and colleague Joe Janzen said average U.S. yields could be slightly lower than projected by the USDA because of dry weather across the Midwest in June. They suggested a soybean yield of 51 bushels an acre and a corn yield of 176 bushels an acre.
At those yields, the soybean crop would total 4.463 billion bushels — still a record — and the corn crop would be 14.414 billion bushels, the fourth largest ever.
Harvest time is months away and crops are in the early stages of development, so there is a good deal of uncertainty about the size of this year’s crops. The USDA will make its first survey-based estimate of the fall harvest in early August.
Commodity prices soared last winter in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The USDA projects that this year’s corn crop will sell for an average of $6.75 a bushel, the highest season-average price in nine years, and that soybeans will fetch a record $14.70 a bushel. Irwin and Janzen said the farm-gate price for corn might average $6.25 a bushel because the corn stockpile was a bit larger than expected and plantings were modestly larger as well.
“If nothing changes … Ukraine — by the end of the 2023 marketing year — is well on the way to sitting on almost a billion bushels of inventories, mainly corn, wheat, and barley and some sunflowers,” said Irwin. “At some point, that will get to the market, but it’s hard to see that happening soon.”
The global supply-and-demand picture “could really change” if the bottled-up grain is released, he said.
The Acreage report is available here.
The Grain Stocks report is available here.