World Ag supply and demand up

Washington--Good news for Idaho Farmers, The latest World Agriculture Supply and Demand report projects record crops and demand.

The May WASDE report says the new marketing-year production and crop expectations are strong, according to Farm Bureau Economist Michael Nepveux.

“This is the highlight of the spring USDA reports as it incorporates the farmer planting decisions from the March Prospective Plantings report and adapts supply estimates to reflect weekly Planting Progress reports. The big story leading up to this report we’ve seen is the rising prices due to increased global demand for U.S. commodities,” said Nepveux.

And Economists at the USDA project corn production at 14.9 billion bushels, up 800 million bushels from last year.

“This is just second behind the 2016 production when U.S. corn farmers produced just over 15.1 billion bushels. For soybeans, USDA is projecting a new crop at 4.4 billion bushels, and it’s projecting total supplies to decline about 130 million bushels from the current marketing year. There are still quite a few folks out there who think that we are going to see higher acres in the June acreage report that’s released next month as we’ve seen prices have continued higher following when farmers responded to those March surveys,” said Nepveux

This month, USDA estimates 2020/21 corn exports to be a record 2.7 billion bushels and expects tight supplies.

“For new crop corn, USDA projects ending stocks will rise about 250 million bushels to 1.5 billion. That’s quite a bit more than most traders were anticipating and that’s helped to drive some of this pullback in markets that we’ve been seeing. For new crop beans, USDA projects soybean ending stock will rise to 140 million bushels. The old crop bean stocks to use ratio came in at 2.6 percent and the new crop is projected at 3.2 percent,” said Nepveux.

Crops and demand will be up, if the weather cooperates this could be a banner Ag year.