USDA’s Next Big Report Day is March 29

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USDA’s Next Big Report Day is March 29
Todd Hubbs, Agricultural Economist - University of Illinois

Corn farmers across the planet are bracing themselves for the USDA report due out at the end of this month. Todd Gleason has this report….

The agency has been surveying farmers…
2:07 radio
2:16 radio self-contained

The agency has been surveying farmers in the Midwest to see how many acres of corn they expect to plant. That’s called the Prospective Plantings report. The other big item due at 11am central Thursday, March 29th is quarterly grain stocks number. It is nearly a census of some 9000 grain elevators and storage facilities across the United States to evaluate how much crop remains on hand. The tricky part of making this calculation says University of Illinois Agricultural Economist Todd Hubbs is figuring the feed and residual usage for the livestock sector.

Hubbs :31 …1.68 billion bushels of disappearance for the second quarter.

Quote Summary - Most of the other use categories we track pretty well. Feed and residual is different. We have really no good idea as we move through the marketing year what that is going to be and I look at historical data and what the USDA is saying the number is going to be. USDA is currently saying 5.55 billion bushels. And if that is right we should see, based on some historical data, around 1.68 billion bushels of disappearance for the second quarter.

Let me explain some of that comment. The number of bushels on hand can roughly calculated prior to the release of the report. This is because we know from the USDA World Agricultural Supply and Demand report how many bushels of corn were in the United States when the marketing year began, 16.9 billion, and can subtract off the number of bushels that have been used to make ethanol and for export since then. There is no good way to track how many bushels have actually been consumed by livestock. However, USDA has an estimated consumption number for the year. It is 5.55 billion bushels.

From these four numbers, the March 1 grain stocks figure can be calculated says Todd Hubbs. His estimate is 8.639 billion bushels of corn. If it is at this level, Hubbs says the March 1 stocks would be 17 million bushels above last year’s corn stocks estimate at this same time.