- The majority of the industry gets all in a lather over USDA's March 31 quarterly Grain Stocks and Prospective Plantings reports, ignoring the fact markets have been keeping us updated all along.
- The various cash indexes told us available stocks-to-use were looser than a month and year ago at the end of February.
- Tracking the Nov23 soybean/Dec23 corn futures spread from September through February showed us corn did its best to buy acres away from soybeans.
There is a great deal of hype surrounding USDA’s quarterly Grain Stocks and annual Prospective Plantings reports, but here’s the reality: We already know what we need to know about both March 1 stocks and expected acres, with USDA simply adding make-believe numbers to the already volatile mix. I want to make this absolutely clear: This piece is not my guess on USDA’s guesses, but rather a summation of what the markets were actually telling us at the end of February. I do not play the game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey everyone else does.
