Corn exports tighten ending stocks

CHARLOTTE, Mich. — A bump in corn exports pushed ending stocks lower than traders expected in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s supply and demand estimates report on Dec. 9.

Consus Ag Consulting copartners Angie and Karl Setzer reviewed the key data from the crop balance sheets on their live podcast on X.

What were traders expecting on the corn estimates leading up to the report?

Angie Setzer: Traders were expecting a 2.124 billion bushels carryout. USDA raised corn exports by 125 million bushels to 3.2 billion bushels for a carryout of 2.029 billion bushels.

Ethanol use was unchanged at 5.6 billion bushels. Feed and residual was left alone. So, that lower ending stocks number came entirely from exports.

Were there any changes of note on the U.S. soybean and wheat balance sheets?

Angie Setzer: Soybean carryout was left unchanged at 290 million bushels. Traders were expecting soybean carryout up slightly to 302 million bushels. Nothing was changed on the soybean side.

Wheat carryout was unchanged at 901 million bushels. Traders were expecting that to come in a little bit lower at 890 million bushels due to the potential shift in exports. USDA didn’t do anything, just basically left that entire balance sheet unchanged.

While there are typically few changes to the domestic balance sheets in the December report, there were expectations of some movement in the global numbers.

Karl Setzer: World corn carryout at 279.15 million metric tons, lower than expected by about 2 million metric tons.

World soybean carryout of 122.37 million metric tons was a little higher than what we were last month at 122 million metric tons which was a little less than what trade expected. We split the difference there. So, not a huge change for global soybeans.

Angie Setzer: World wheat carryout was higher than expected at 274.87 million metric tons, up from 271.43 million last month. Traders were expecting 272.78 million.

The big production changes, they took Argentina up to 24 million metric tons, Australia up to 37. Canada up to 39.96. EU up to 144, Russia up to 87.5 and Ukraine was left unchanged. Brazil, everyone else were unchanged on that side of things.

The gains on global wheat stocks were more than anticipated. That came in from Canada, Russia, Argentina and a handful of others.

Karl Setzer: Ukraine’s corn crop production came in at 29 million metric tons, almost 3 million from what we had before. Ukraine just put out yesterday that they were putting their crop production at 30 million metric tons, so we undercut them just a touch there.

Angie Setzer: These are big issues in Ukraine. You’ve still got over 20% of the corn crops standing, and standing at relatively high moisture. There’s an article that floated around that talked about them trying to harvest 30% moisture corn in multiple stages.

Important to remember, too, with Ukraine right now is that they’re continuing to deal with infrastructure damage to their energy. They’ve got the rolling blackout, and it’s really making life extra difficult there for folks.

Ukraine corn exports were trimmed by 1.5 million metric tons and, like Karl said, production dropped down to 29 million metric tons which I think is something you’ll see trimmed even further, at least on the export side when all is said and done there.