Trade turns to stocks, acreage reports

CHARLOTTE, Mich. — As expected, for the second straight month only minimal changes were made in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s supply and demand report on June 11.

“I know there were a lot of folks — the ‘agri-tourists’ — that were disappointed last month that the USDA didn’t go ahead and make a big adjustment to production based on the situation in the Middle East or whatever. It’s just not their M.O., especially if you talk to them about what took place in June of 2019 and how ill-gotten that adjustment was to supply that year as we moved forward,” said Angie Setzer, co-founder of Consus Ag Consulting.

“It’s just not something I think they’re going to play with again, and kind of understanding the sequence of events as it stands for the USDA can be helpful.”

Setzer and Consus Ag copartner Karl Setzer hosted a live podcast on X as the USDA crop balance sheets were rolled out.

How did the U.S. supply and demand numbers compare to pre-report trade estimates?

Angie Setzer: USDA took the wheat carryout down to 744 million bushels. Traders were expecting it to come in at about 765 million bushels.

Beginning wheat stocks come in at 935 million, so old crop ending stocks were basically unchanged month-over-month. That helped the new crop wheat ending stocks come down. Yield was adjusted one-half bushel lower per acre on the wheat side.

Corn old crop carryout came in at 2.145 billion bushels. That’s about 7 million bushels higher than what traders were expecting, up 3 million bushels from last month. So, there’s a whole lot of nothing there.

Basically, it looks like we rubber-stamped ourselves from last month to this month, and there’s a 3-million-bushel adjustment that took place and then that carried forward for corn.

So, we came in at 1.96 billion bushels on new crop corn carryout. Traders were expecting it to be about 13 million bushels lower than that.

On the soybean side of things, they left everything unchanged there, as well. Old crop carryout was unchanged at 340 million bushels.

USDA raised old crop crushings 20 million bushels and lowered exports by 20 million bushels. I thought that would be expected.

New crop soybean ending stocks were unchanged at 310 million bushels and everything was left unchanged from last month to this month on that side.

What were among the highlights, if any, in the global numbers?

Karl Setzer: The Argentine 2025-2026 corn crop was increased from 59 million metric tons to 61 million, and the 2025-2026 soybean crop there was increased from 48 million metric tons to 50 million. The 2026-2027 soybean crop in Argentina was unchanged at 50 million metric tons.

Angie Setzer: World corn carryout came in a little higher than what traders were expecting with that bump in Argentina and it doesn’t look like they offset that as much. World corn carryout was 281.22 million metric tons versus trade expectations of a 278.5 million.

Argentina carryout came up one-half million ton. Major exports as a whole had a little bit of an increase in ending stocks. They did leave China alone completely. No change in the China side for corn.

Karl Setzer: Nothing really here in the global numbers is surprising me at all. It’s all within the estimates, with a little fine-tuning to the Argentine crops. Really, all in all, it is pretty much as expected. There was nothing too far out of line.

Angie Setzer: They did bump up their expectations for Ukraine new crop wheat exports by 1 million metric tons and reduced their carryout expectations which is kind of interesting to me.

They basically reduced carry-in beginning stocks, but nothing I’ve seen indicated that beginning stocks had grown, but they did they raise them.

They raised Ukraine’s production estimate a half million metric tons, went ahead and bumped up their exports by 1 million metric ton on the wheat side.

Russia’s wheat ending stocks were reduced by a half million metric tons, left their exports unchanged and bumped their production up a couple million.

So, just kind of some minor adjustments as to be expected here for the month of June. Market-wise, not anything that’s going to feed a bull or anything like that by any means.

Any big takeaways from this report?

Angie Setzer: Wheat carryout came in lower than what traders were expecting. We got updated wheat production numbers from NASS where they trimmed another half bushel an acre off from their yield expectations.

Looking at old crop by class, USDA didn’t change much in the by class breakdown and that left us at that 935 million bushel carryout for wheat as a whole.

Overall, pretty much a big non-event. If anyone was expecting anything big out of this report, they’re going to be disappointed, but I think we just start to focus on weather and that does continue to look wet and relatively cool here for the next couple of weeks.

Are other parts of the USDA reports that stand out?

Karl Setzer: We just rubber-stamped this, get it over with and start looking at the June 30 quarterly stocks and acreage numbers.

Angie Setzer: The report that we get at the end of June will be the big one. We’ll get quarterly stocks. We’ll get planted acres.

The USDA said that they have surveyed more farmers in this go-around. So, we’ll see if they get a better response rate out of anyone or what we have going on there.

That’ll be a good acreage update that’ll kind of reset things to a certain extent, and it’ll also give us quarterly stocks just to kind of reconcile usage over the last quarter.