corn

Over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told 150 farmers at the Iowa Corn Growers annual conference that federal regulatory malfeasance is destroying agriculture in California, reports the Des Moines Register.

Subsidy payments under the new Agricultural Risk Coverage program will vary by as much as $90 an acre among counties in the same state for 2014 crops, said economists Carl Zulauf of Ohio State and Gary Schnitkey of U-Illinois.

The Justice Department's use of a secretive national-security court to prevent the theft of hybrid corn seed developed by U.S. companies indicates the gravity of Sino-U.S. competition, says the The New Republic.

Crop-insurance claims by farmers for prevented planting are up by 48 percent this year, said Bloomberg, a reflection of the cold and rainy spring. Growers filed claims on 2.3 million acres of corn and nearly 2.2 million acres of soybeans, said the news agency, based on its review of federal data.

The corn and soybean crops will be slightly smaller than forecast by USDA, says Pro Farmer at the end of a week-long sampling of fields across the Midwest and northern Plains.

Corn and soybean growers will harvest smaller crops than projected by the government, according to a private survey of 1,300 growers, but that will mean little relief for depressed market prices.

The world grain harvest "is still expected to be the third-largest ever," despite a heat wave that hurt the wheat and corn crops in Europe, said the International Grains Council in its monthly Grain Market Report.

U.S. Judge Stephanie Rose dismissed charges against a Chinese woman, Mo Yun, accused of conspiring to steal trade secrets from U.S. seed companies, said the Associated Press.

After a wet and cold spring that delayed planting, the U.S. corn and soybean crops now are ahead of the usual pace for development, says the weekly Crop Progress report. Some 34 percent of the corn crop is silking, one point ahead of the five-year average and double the rating one year ago. And 41 percent of soybeans are blooming, 2 points ahead of average and 17 points ahead of the 2013 crop for the second week of July.

The three most widely planted U.S. crops - corn, soybeans and wheat - account for roughly 68 percent of crop insurance sales, says USDA, a dominating total but smaller than 15 years earlier. Then, the three crops were responsible for 80 percent of acres enrolled in crop insurance. With new types of policies and more crops eligible for coverage, the share held by the three major crops has declined. USDA says pasture, forage and range land zoomed to 48 million acres insured in 2012 compared to zero in 1997.

One of the world's agricultural giants, the European Union, is seeing its wheat and corn crops dwindle due to hot and dry weather that is lowering yields. In its World Agricultural Production report, the USDA lowered its forecast of the EU wheat crop by 2 percent and the corn crop by 3.5 percent from estimates made in early June.

The government will update its projections of the corn and soybean crops tomorrow at noon ET with analysts expecting a record-setting fall harvest. If the expectations prove true, the second year in a row of mammoth crops would leave the country awash in grain and drive down commodity prices. At Chicago, corn for delivery in December closed on Wednesday at $3.98 a bushel, down 1.6 percent for the day; in May, corn sold for more than $5, said Agrimoney.

The Agricultural Market Information System, an international body, said it raised its forecast of this season's corn crop worldwide "significantly, mostly on improved outlook for crops in the EU and the United States." AMIS pegged the crop at 1,001 million tonnes, up 13 million tonnes from a month ago, and said end stocks for 2014/15 would rise by 27 million tonnes.

An extended dry spell will slash the corn harvest in southern Africa by 26 percent from last year's bumper harvest, according to a quarterly FAO report. Corn is the major grain in the region, accounting for 80 percent of cereal production.

Deputy Agriculture Secretary Krysta Harden will take part in the annual U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing this week, says USDA. Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew are leaders of the U.S. delegation for meetings Wednesday and Thursday on "the challenges and opportunities that both countries face on a wide range of bilateral, regional and global areas," said a State Department official quoted by AFP.

With continued good weather, U.S. corn and soybean crops could be well above the records now projected for this year, says economist Carl Zulauf of Ohio State University. "The current crop conditions report suggests that yields are likely to be above trend line," Zulauf writes after citing four methods to estimate the potential yields.