04/11/24 USDA Does Not Budge on Outlier Estimates for Brazil

The morning started off with fresh estimates from Brazil’s CONAB agency that served as benchmark levels to compare with the USDA report. Traders seemed to still be skeptical of the USDA doing much to close the gap, since corn and soybean futures largely shrugged off what looked to be bullish numbers from CONAB. In the end, it was right not to count on the USDA coming down to earth on its Brazilian estimates, seeing as the government analysts came in well above the average trade estimates because they did not change the numbers at all.   Some analysts argue that CONAB is holding too low on its Brazilian acreage estimates, but that does not seem to account for entire discrepancy against the USDA’s figures for Brazilian soybean production. The difference between the USDA and CONAB is now over 300 million bushels for this year’s soybean crop while the USDA will still higher than CONAB on last year’s soybean crop by almost 275 million bushels. The distance between estimates for Brazil’s corn crops from both this year and last year has USDA on the high side by nearly 650 million bushels.   Even with all of the anticipation that had been…