01/11/2025 Special Weekend Report USDA Finally Comes Clean

Demand was Never as Bad…Yields were Never as Large as USDA Told us They Were in 2024 The November 2024 to January 2025 adjustments in the corn and soybean balance sheets were the second largest in history. USDA has most of their plots harvested by the November crop production estimate which means they have accurate harvest data with which to calculate production. Even in 1979, which was a flood adverse year, USDA corrected their overestimate of production that year in the November report. There was a time last summer that despite late planted crops and flooding in the NW Corn Belt, USDA thought we would have full trendline yields and would come into 2025 with a 2.5 bln bushel carryover. Somewhere and somehow, between then and now, we lost a billion bushels from the carryover. Instead of a year-to-year expansion in the corn carryover, the USDA now projects that the carryover will be just 1.54 bln bushel. The previous year’s carryover was 1.763 bln bushels so we start out this marketing season with 223 mln bushels less supply than last. That is not bearish. It means more corn acres in 2025 are needed and that we will need to produce…