soybean crop

Warm and dry weather brought "widespread worsening of drought and dryness" to the upper Midwest in the past week, particularly in Iowa and Wisconsin, said the Drought Monitor.

Large swaths of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are abnormally dry and most of Michigan is in moderate drought due to limited spring precipitation, said the weekly Drought Monitor on Thursday. Arid conditions covered 48 percent of the Midwest, the heart of U.S. corn and soybean production.

U.S. farmers will plant less corn and soybean land than expected this year, despite a surge in commodity prices, suggesting that tighter grain supplies will persist into 2022, said the USDA on Wednesday. Although with normal weather and yields, the corn and soybean harvests could be the second largest ever, they will not be quite as large as projected by traders and the government.

U.S. farmers will respond to high commodity prices by harvesting their largest soybean crop ever and a corn crop that could tie the record set in 2016, projected USDA on Friday. Delivered to a hungry world recovering from the pandemic, the 2021 corn and soybean crops would fetch some of the highest farm-gate prices in years.

Despite dry weather at the start of the planting season, Brazil is headed for its second record-setting soybean harvest in a row, said USDA analysts, who forecast the 2020/21 crop at 133 million metric tonnes, up nearly 6 percent from last year.

In the past year, the record-large U.S. soybean stockpile shrank by 42 percent, thanks to strong demand for the oilseed and the smallest crop since 2013, said the USDA on Wednesday. Nonetheless, the Sept. 1 inventory of 523 million bushels is the fourth largest since soybeans became a major U.S. crop in the 1940s.

One week after the Nov. 3 general election, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Steve Censky will start work for his former employer, the American Soybean Association (ASA) as its chief executive officer. Censky held that post for 21 years before joining the Trump administration in 2017.

Recent increases in market prices are making soybeans more attractive, and farmers will respond by expanding soybean acreage by nearly 5 percent in 2021 while holding steady on corn acreage, said Farm Futures on Wednesday.

With a rebound in U.S. production, the world soybean crop will be a record 364 million tonnes in 2020/21, up 8 percent from this season, said the International Grains Council on Thursday. Record-setting corn and wheat crops were also forecast for 2020/21.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected an emergency motion for an immediate cutoff of farmer use of the weedkiller dicamba, a victory for the EPA plan to allow spraying of the herbicide on GE soybeans and cotton through July 31. The court voided EPA approval of versions of dicamba sold by Bayer, BASF and Corteva on June 3; a few days later, the EPA said farmers could use stocks already on the farm through the end of July.

Low market prices on this year's corn and soybean crops due to the coronavirus could trigger up to $7.2 billion in USDA subsidies to corn and soybean growers, said five university economists on Wednesday. "In estimating the damage that U.S. crop agriculture has suffered, it is important to take into account the payments made by existing farm safety net programs," they said. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>

After looking at the latest USDA price projections for corn, wheat, and soybeans, and taking into account price patterns for the crops, five university economists say the Price Loss Coverage subsidy is a better choice for growers than the Agricultural Risk Coverage subsidy for corn and wheat grown this year.