The Agriculture Department is to release a handful of potentially pivotal reports today at noon ET that could set the tone for futures markets until spring-planting data becomes available. They include a final look at 2014 U.S. crop production; the monthly WASDE report with its estimates of crop output and usage worldwide; the Winter Wheat Seedings report, the first hint of this year’s crops, and the quarterly Grain Stocks report, which will indicate if vast U.S. stockpiles, swollen by two years of large crops, will continue to depress prices or if consumption is whittling the stockpiles into manageable size.
AgriMoney quoted Don Roose of U.S. Commodities, a brokerage, as saying the cluster of USDA reports can sway the futures markets – “The average in modern times for soybeans is a move of 34 cents a bushel, up or down, and of 25 cents a bushel for corn.” Barring major changes in South American crops, the USDA reports will be the benchmark for the markets until late March, which USDA will release its survey of farmers’ planting intentions.
In surveys ahead of today’s reports, traders said they expect marginal changes in USDA’s estimates of record-large corn and soybean crops. The corn estimate would drop by 50-60 million bushels from the current 14.47 billion bushels, they said, and soybeans might change by a few million bushels out of the forecast 3.958 billion bushels. With little change in output, the outlook for year-end stockpiles would change little as well, they said. USDA has projected the lowest season-average price in several years for the 2014 crops.
USDA was expected by traders to report plantings of 42.6 million acres of winter wheat, slightly larger than the 42.4 million acres of 2014. Once plantings are known, rules of thumb allow a projection of the winter wheat crop and for the overall U.S. wheat crop. Based on average yields and abandonment rates for the previous three years, 42.6 million acres could bring a winter wheat crop of 1.4 billion bushels. Winter wheat accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. wheat from 2012-2014, so a winter wheat crop of 1.4 billion bushels this year could mean all wheat production of 2.1 billion bushels.