USDA Forecasts

The USDA released a set of reports on Jan. 12 containing information with implications for corn and soybean prices in 2018.

Seth Meyer, Chairman of USDA's Outlook Board, saying at this point in the marketing year, there's not a lot of wiggle room for change in USDA's forecasts for average crop prices.

"Now what it comes to prices those are obviously prices received by farmers and those are very front-loaded in terms of marketing so you know much of the crop more than half of the crop is already marketed by the time you get to February significant amount of it's marketed but again it drops off pretty sharply because we've already marketed a fair amount of the crop when you think about traditional marketing weights so as we're going along now there's a lot more limited room to get much price moving in terms of those prices received by Farmers could have a lot of it's already been marketed."

Farmers and policymakers are interested in season-average forecasts of prices received by farmers for corn, soybeans, and wheat. These forecasts are also needed to compute Price Loss Coverage (PLC) payment rates and Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) payments that are offered under the Farm Act.

USDA's Office of the Chief Economist is forecasting soybeans will reach a record 91 million planted acres in 2018—equal to that of their rotation partner, corn, at 91 million acres. Pro Farmer agrees with USDA that soybean acres will be equal to corn but expects fewer acres overall.