NAPERVILLE, Illinois, June 28 (Reuters) - Market participants frequently have grievances with U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, especially when it comes to acreage and yields, though analysts are mostly satisfied with this year’s planting estimates first published in March.
Analysts polled ahead of USDA’s June area survey, due on Friday at noon EDT (1600 GMT), see corn acres at 91.85 million, down slightly from 92 million in March. Soybeans were pegged at 87.67 million acres, up from 87.5 million in March.
Since at least 1980, the only June that featured similarly small acreage changes versus March for both crops was 2002, so it is statistically unlikely that corn and soy will both land so close to the March number.
Analysts are relatively confident in those predictions. The range of estimates on corn acres is 2 million, the smallest for this report since 2017 and below the three-year average of 3.5 million. The soybean range of 1.5 million acres is the smallest since 2005 and below the 2.75-million average.
Interestingly, within the last six years, June soybean acres landed outside the estimate range in the three years with the largest ranges (2022, 2021, 2019). In the last four years, corn acres also ended up out-of-range in the two years where trade guesses varied the most (2020, 2019).
Corn acres have a strong tendency to rise from the March to June survey, doing so in 15 of the last 20 Junes, so the trade’s expectation of a cut is a bit outside the norm. However, the five declining years included both the fastest- and slowest-ever corn planting seasons.
This year’s corn planting pace was near the longer-term average, but heavy rains were problematic in North Dakota for a second consecutive year. Rains eased right at the end of the state’s corn-planting window, creating more uncertainty over those acres but likely supporting soybean and wheat efforts.
June soybean acres have come higher than March in 11 of the past 20 years, though they were lower in three of the past four. The years in which they were lower were also spread among various planting paces.
Soybeans were planted quickly in 2023, though that was also the case in 2021, when June soybean acres were slightly lower than in March as analysts overestimated the impact of rallying prices on plantings.
Planting conditions were mostly ideal across the Corn Belt, but price trends were not. By the time farmers were in the thick of planting in mid-May, percentage losses since the start of 2023 in new-crop corn and soybean futures were the largest in over two decades.
Last year featured one of the trade’s best-ever performances on June corn acres, coming within a tenth of a percent of the published number. Analysts’ corn numbers were too high in 2021 and 2020, but they were too low in the four prior years.
June bean acres have come in below the trade guess for the last eight years, more heavily in the last four. Analysts’ soy and corn acreage misses in this year’s March survey were lighter than usual.
The last two times June corn and soybean acres both came within a percent of the published figures were 2018 and 2015. Karen Braun is a market analyst for Reuters. Views expressed above are her own.
(Reporting by Karen Braun Editing by Matthew Lewis)
