By Kirk Maltais


A spring with little in the way of adverse weather has U.S. farmers entering the summer on pace for record crop sizes - although recent flooding and stifling summer heat could still derail that early progress.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is scheduled to release its Acreage report on Friday - the data are released by the USDA every June to evaluate how many acres farmers managed to plant of their crops in the preceding spring. Analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal forecast that planted acreage should exceed the USDA's March estimates.

Surveyed analysts forecast that farmers planted roughly 90.27 million acres of corn this spring, along with 86.86 million acres of soybeans and 47.58 million acres of wheat. For corn, this would represent a drop of over 4 million acres from last year's planting, while for soybeans it would be an improvement of over 3 million acres. For wheat, it would be a decline of roughly 2 million acres.

What may buoy production figures for corn and soybeans is record-sized yields - how many bushels an average acre is expected to produce. The USDA will not have the opportunity to update its yield outlooks until its next monthly WASDE report in July, but its current expectations are for record highs.

For corn, the USDA currently expects the average yield at 181 bushels an acre. If realized, that's roughly 4 bushels an acre higher than the previous record set last year. Soybeans are forecast at 52 bushels an acre, which would be 0.1 bushels higher than the previous record set in 2016.

With these big yields, many traders and analysts are not worried about tightening supplies. "It's fair to say that the expectation is that the U.S. will have plenty of corn, wheat, and soybean supplies at the end of this marketing year," said Jake Hanley, managing director with Teucrium Trading.

Futures prices on the Chicago Board of Trade reflect a lack of anxiety over crop supplies. Continuous corn futures have traded between $4 and $5 a bushel in 2024, and have shed roughly 5% in the past 30 days, according to FactSet data. Soybean futures are trading at $11.09 a bushel Wednesday, which is the lowest they've been in roughly three and a 1/2 years.

Fund traders remain net short in grains through the first half of June - another sign of their reluctance to calculate any risk from inclement weather on U.S. crops. According to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, managed money funds are short on corn by nearly 200,000 contracts through the first half of June, short in soybeans by over 100,000 contracts, and short in wheat futures by roughly 85,000 contracts.

However, analysts and traders acknowledge that summer weather is unpredictable and always carries the potential for drastically altering the outcome for crops. Even so, prices have notably shown little shifting following excessive rains in Corn Belt states like Minnesota and Iowa that has sparked flooding. A heatwave baking wheat crops growing in southern states has also shown little impact on prices.

That might change following Friday's report, said Donna Hughes, a senior risk management consultant with StoneX Group. "I guess we will see how things turn out on Friday and then maybe the flooding, weather, etc. will come back into focus more," Hughes said.


Write to Kirk Maltais at kirk.maltais@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

06-26-24 1422ET