Billion bushel plus carryout would be record for wheat

Farm and Ranch March 17, 2010 If it holds, the USDA says its forecast of U.S. wheat ending stocks for the current marketing year would be a first, and that would be a one billion plus bushel carryover. That would represent a 52 percent increase over this past marketing year’s ending stocks. Still, Jerry Bange, Chair of the USDA’s Outlook Board, points out that the marketing year average price for wheat was raised from February’s estimate.

Bange: “We did actually increase our price forecast for 2009-10 by five cents. We went up to $4.90 at the mid-point and the reason for that is, is that about 87% of the crop has been marketed already. And if you look at the price that has been achieved on that, it has been right about $4.95 and the implication here is that we would expect to see a little bit lower price for the remaining 10 or 15% of the crop to be somewhere around $4.70 :

In its latest Wheat Outlook the USDA says accumulated white wheat exports are nearly on pace with the five year average and are substantially above last year’s pace. Hard red spring wheat exports have fallen off last year’s pace in recent weeks and are substantially behind the five year average. So are hard red winter and soft red winter accumulated exports. Total U.S. wheat exports for the marketing year are forecast to be the lowest since 1971-72.

White wheat is the only class projected to see a decline in ending stocks year-to-year, a 19 percent decline, while other classes could increase from 21 to 80 percent, with soft red winter seeing the biggest increase.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

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