USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) raised some eyebrows on June 30 with the release of its latest Crop Production report, which put the U.S. corn crop at 87 million acres, the second highest acreage in more than 60 years and some 2 million acres higher than USDA’s March 2009 Prospective Plantings corn estimate.
That figure, up 1 million acres from 2008 and second only to 2007’s record crop, came as a surprise to many after the planting delays experienced during an extraordinarily wet spring in the Eastern Cornbelt. Despite those delays, USDA said, U.S. farmers were able to plant 97 percent of the intended corn acreage by early June, trailing the 10-year average of 98 percent by only one percentage point.
Following the report’s release on Tuesday, July corn dropped 35 cents to $3.42 per bushel, and the December corn price fell the maximum amount of 30 cents during Tuesday’s afternoon trading session, to $3.67 per bushel. The Wall Street Journal cited an analyst from J.P. Morgan who said the acreage increase “is sufficiently large to meaningfully recast the longer-term outlook for corn prices,” and another from Citigroup who predicted that corn prices will drop below $3 per bushel before the year is through if favorable weather produces good yields.
Not everyone was buying the new corn acreage estimates. One Nebraska dealer told Green Markets that he “has a lot of problems” with the USDA numbers, citing USDA’s estimate that corn acreage in the state jumped from 8.8 million in 2008 to 9.4 million this year. “There is no way we have that many extra acres, 600,000 acres,” he said. “Just doing the math, we didn’t have that kind of increase. It didn’t happen.”
The report also showed an upswing in planted soybean area in the U.S. to a record 77.5 million acres in 2009, 1.8 million acres higher than last year and 1.5 million acres above the March estimate. Compared with 2008, soybean planted area is up more than 200,000 acres in five states: Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota. USDA said the largest decrease is in Nebraska, down 400,000 acres from 2008, as many farmers switched to corn this year. The report noted record high planted soybean acreage in Kansas, New York, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania.
Soybean prices also fell in the wake of the report’s release, with the November contract price dropping 22.8 cents on Tuesday, or 2.3 percent, to $9.61 per bushel.
All wheat planted area is estimated at 59.8 million acres, down 5 percent from 2008. USDA said the 2009 winter wheat planted area, at 43.4 million acres, is 6 percent below last year but up 1 percent from the previous estimate.
All cotton plantings for 2009 are estimated at 9.05 million acres, with upland cotton coming in at 8.91 million acres. Both figures are 4 percent below last year and the lowest since 1983. In Mississippi and Louisiana, producers planted the lowest upland acreages on record at 270,000 and 240,000 acres, respectively. The largest percentage decline is in California, however, where upland producers planted just 65,000 acres, 46 percent less than last year. USDA reported increases in upland cotton acreage from last year in Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Overall, U.S. farmers planted 320.9 million acres to principal crops in 2009, the report said. This is 3.9 million acres less than last year, but 3.9 million acres more than was indicated in the March 2009 Prospective Plantings report. The most significant acreage declines were in North Dakota, down 2.1 million, and Texas, down 570,000 acres.
NASS based its acreage estimates on surveys conducted during the first two weeks of June on approximately 11,000 segments of land and from a sample of approximately 73,500 farmers across the U.S. The Aug. 12 Crop Production report will contain the first 2009 estimates of corn and soybean yield and production.