Corn demand improves

CHICAGO — The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed in its Feb. 10 supply and demand estimates report that corn demand continues to improve, but supplies remain plentiful.

“As typical with February reports, not a lot of fresh news or fresh data for the market to chew on,” Mark Soderberg, ADM Investor Services senior ag market analyst, said in video posted on X.

“The WASDE update was rather uneventful outside of the USDA statement essentially saying that China might buy U.S. soybeans, they might not, but if they do we’ll have less to sell to others. To me, it sounds like the current USDA export forecast at 1.575 billion bushels isn’t going up any time soon.”

Here are Soderberg’s comments regarding USDA’s report.

On Soybeans

In the soybean market, no changes to the U.S. balance sheet. U.S. soybean ending stocks were left unchanged at 350 million bushels.

Also, no change on the product side, as well. That was a little bit of a surprise there. I thought we might see a little bit of a reduction in the amount of bean oil used for the production of biofuels.

Perhaps some of that is shifting to other domestic usage or to exports, but for now USDA made no changes and kind of kicked that can down the road a little bit to see if we see any new demand from China impacting the balance sheets moving forward.

On the global side, USDA kicked up the Brazilian soybean production forecast another 2 million metric tons to a new record 180 million metric tons. Half of that was absorbed via higher crush and the other half went to ending stocks. Brazil crush was increased 1 million metric tons to 61 million.

Global soybean stocks are up about 1.1 million metric tons to 125.5 million. That was in line with expectations.

On Corn

Corn was probably the biggest surprise here. USDA upped their export forecast another 100 million bushels to a record 3.3 billion. That resulted in ending stocks down 100 million to 2.127 billion bushels, and that was at the lower end of the range of trade guesses.

We did see corn ending stocks globally down to 289 million metric tons. That was down 2 million largely due to the lower stocks in the U.S.

No changes were made to South American production. They kept Brazil at 131 million metric tons, and Argentine corn was left at 53 million metric tons. Ukraine’s corn exports were cut by 1 million metric tons to 22 million.

On Wheat

We did see a 5 million bushel increase in U.S. wheat ending stocks to 931 million bushels. Expectations were for about a 10 million bushel drop.

The increase came as a result of a 5 million bushels drop in feed usage that came from the hard red winter wheat. So, hard red winter wheat stocks went up 5 million bushels.

Global ending wheat stocks are actually down nearly 1 million metric tons to 277.5 million. We didn’t see much change in global production. Argentina wheat production was increased by 3 million metric tons to 27.8 million.

We did see higher export numbers. Argentine exports are up 2 million metric tons to 18 millon. We also saw Canada’s wheat export forecast up 1 million to 29 million metric tons.