08/19/2024 Don’t Break My Heart Profarmer

On the Grains
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, by the time this hits the inbox, we will have Profarmer scouts turning and burning. What they find will be of some interest to the market. However, two things stick out on the Profarmer tour, the first is that they will be driving in the garden areas this year and the second will be that 9 of the last 12 years they have underestimated the USDA final yield. The last two years they have underestimated the final yield by 5.3 bpa on corn. While make no mistake, I do not want that job, I walked enough corn fields when I was in high school and I’m more than willing to admit that it would be a difficult job to estimating with such a lengthy fill period remaining. In a roundabout way, if the tour comes in at 180 bpa the trade will look at that as confirmation of a record national yield, maybe even as high as 184 bpa, and set the tone into fall.  With most of the poor corn this year north of I90 and west of I35 it will probably take until the January crop report before we can expect any yield revisions lower, even the January report might be a stretch and we will be back to playing the adjust the stocks number into 2025.