(AgWeb) – Planting started strong this spring, but that progress could be stalling out as rainy weather brings fieldwork to a muddy halt.
With recent weeks bringing more than 10 inches of rain in North Dakota, for example, “there’s plenty of water,” said Jerry Gulke, president of the Gulke Group in Chicago, who says prevent plant is definitely a possibility in that area of the country. “They’ve talked about prevent plant corn and even some soybeans—it’s that wet. That’s pothole country—once you get water in the ground, it’s hard to get rid of it.”
He expects those wet fields could impact the number of corn acres and more this year. “It’s pretty late to expect a reasonable crop, especially in corn,” Gulke told Farm Journal Radio. “… I see some acres dropping there in North Dakota. Of course, we knew last week (from the USDA’s) Crop Progress that Missouri’s behind, and I think they got more water since then. They’re behind down there, and I don’t know that if they stop planting corn–if they haven’t already—if they could even get the beans in.”
Will those situations affect the market in the second week of June, as the USDA releases its updated World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates? Maybe, maybe not, according to Gulke, who expects the June report to be a “ho-hum deal.”
“I don’t know if we have enough information [about corn] to say exports are going to get better or worse. I think they’ll keep everything pretty stable, and as I understand it, they don’t touch the yield for 2016—they wait until they see the stocks report at the end of the month and the acreage,” Gulke said. “July is a more blockbuster [report] because we’ll have new acres to work with, revised estimates [of acres] by farmers and they’ll look at the crop ratings and weather and whether it’s getting dry enough in some spots to change the yield in July.”
