Latest WASDE Slightly Disappointing for Wheat and Corn

On Friday USDA released its April Crop Production and World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, commonly known as the WASDE report. Changes this month are normally focused on U.S. old crop demand and South American production. For this year, the March and April reports also hold more interest given the potential impacts from Ukraine and Russia.

Citing the uncertainty caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, USDA again lowered projected corn and wheat exports from Ukraine.

Allendale's Rich Nelson says the report was somewhat disappointing for corn and wheat.

“They left ending stocks for corn unchanged at 1.440 billion bushels. This comes despite the fact that they lowered the Ukraine corn export estimate yet again, in this case 4.5 million tons. So, as far as the trade focus, USDA said there's less corn out there on the export market but they said the markets not going to care and USDA is going to wait for all those potential sales in future to see us on the corn side.”

As for Soybeans, Nelson said those numbers were okay.

“Declining U.S. ending stocks from 285 million bushels, now 260, so that decline was reasonable. And as far as things we've been watching for, Brazil's soybean production declined now from 127 to 125 million tons, that's kind of within the trade focus. One small hiccup on the on the soybean side is the fact that USDA did drop their estimate for Chinese soybean imports now 91 million times. That's down nine percent from last year.”