(AgriMoney) – The degree of uncertainty over the US corn crop, even with well over half harvested, has prompted a “massive” range of trade guesses for an official report which promises to be one of the most important of the season.
Soybean and Corn Advisor, the consultancy run by influential crop scout Michael Cordonnier, has followed up Informa’s 11.2bn-bushel estimate on Friday for the US corn crop with a forecast 1.234bn bushels (31.3m tonnes) lower.
The gap between the forecasts, at the extreme ends of the range produced by brokers in the run up to the US Department of Agriculture’s monthly Wasde crop report, is unusually wide.
‘There is no consensus’
Indeed, it is large enough to accommodate the harvest in Argentina, the second-ranked exporter, with room to spare, besides being bigger than the range of estimates ahead of last month’s Wasde report.
And it reflects the degree of uncertainty not only over the yield of the crop – with Informa believing the USDA’s current estimate of 122.8 bushels per acre is too low, and Dr Cordonnier seeing it as too generous – but over harvested area too.
“The consensus for Thursdays production number are out and the best way to describe the numbers is that there is no consensus, especially when it comes to corn,” Darrell Holaday at broker Country Futures said.
“The range in corn production from high to low is 1.2bn bushels. That is massive.”
Country Futures itself believes the Wasde will show a corn production number of 10.42bn bushels.
‘No better than 1988’
Dr Cordonnier said that his forecast for harvested area was based on comparison with 1988, the last severe US drought year, when a far higher proportion than normal of corn was abandoned or chopped for silage.
“I do not think this year is, outside the Deep South, any better than 1988,” he told Agrimoney.com, pegging the area of corn harvested for grain at 83m acres, well below the current USDA figure of 87.4m acres.
Informa Economics has employed not only a lower figure for crop abandoned, but a higher seedings forecast too, by some 1.5m acres, after data from the Farm Services Agency, which handles farm support programmes, indicated that sowings of both corn and soybeans were higher than the USDA figure.
However, Dr Cordonnier questioned the reliability of “part-formed” FSA data which were, thanks to a freedom of information inquiry, released earlier than the agency would have published under its own steam.
Furthermore, the sowings estimates in the USDA’s late-June area report looked likely to be notably accurate, given the early planting season increased the proportion of completed, rather than intended, seedings in farmers’ returns.
‘Desperately needs accurate guidance’
While Wasde reports tend in any event to be high points of the agricultural commodities calendar, Thursday’s Wasde looks especially significant for corn, and soybeans, given the range of forecasts, and at a time when thin supplies magnify the importance of estimate revisions on the crops’ balance sheets.
“Trade desperately needs accurate guidance on 2012 row crop supplies,” said Richard Feltes at broker RJ O’Brien, which pegs the corn harvest at 10.468bn bushels.
