WASDE Confirms Gro’s Corn Projections

Talk to our our team about Gro's offering
Talk to our team
arrow

In its September WASDE report, the USDA brought its corn yield estimates in line with Gro’s projections and pulled its soybean yield estimates closer to Gro’s forecast. 

Gro’s Corn Yield Forecast Model is at 176.11 bushels/acre, compared to the USDA’s corn yield estimate of 176.3, and for soybeans Gro’s Soybean Yield Forecast Model is at 51.16 bu/acre and the USDA’s soybean yield estimate at 50.6 bu/acre.

For corn, increased acreage prompted the USDA’s revision; this change was also captured in the USDA’s recent FSA release, which Gro highlighted here. The USDA’s new corn acreage estimate is now on par with the acreage estimate produced by Gro’s machine learning-based Planting Intentions Model in mid-March. 

All in, the September WASDE report’s revisions push US new-crop corn production up to 14.996 billion bushels, the second highest level on record after 2016. On the soybeans side, this month’s report puts soybean production at 4.374 billion bushels, the US’ third highest level on record. 

These bumper crops are no small feat, considering the ongoing drought conditions in the Western Corn Belt. Also, in its report, the USDA trimmed 400,000 acres off its June soybean acreage estimate. 

These new corn and soybean yield projections largely reflect the Eastern Belt’s favorable growing conditions and recent supportive end-of-season finishing rains.

In its report, WASDE also noted that old-crop supplies are momentarily larger, due to depressed demand and difficult logistics. These forces could keep corn and soybeans locked in-country longer than initially anticipated. Already, this situation has added additional bushels to the balance sheet, increasing stocks-to-use ratios for both crops, while also narrowing spreads, as reflected in Gro’s Futures Spread Tool.  

The September WASDE is an important report as the USDA incorporates data from its objective yield plots for the first time. Gro’s yield models provide a daily-updated read on US yields, using satellite-based, objective data that use near real-time environmental and growing conditions, including vegetative health, soil moisture levels, and GFS 16-day forecasts. The ability to have a daily look at yield provides immeasurable value to decision makers.

This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.

 

Get a demo of Gro
Talk to our enterprise sales team or walk through our platform