Highlights
The USDA could have and should have increased corn exports and ethanol use on yesterday’s S&D, but it did not, as we predicted. If you noted our summary chart of weekly exports inspections we send you every Tuesday, yesterday’s chart showed you the USDA projects corn exports this marketing year to be 6.9% more than a year ago, but with half the marketing year still ahead of us, corn exports are running 38% ahead of year ago.
We know corn exports will slow down in the late spring or early summer, as always, and they will slow some more in late June through the rest of the summer when Brazil and Argentina have corn to export. However, U.S. corn exports to date are 284 million bushels ahead of last year’s pace at this time whereas the USDA projects corn exports will be only 158 million bushels more than a year ago. We say again, only the U.S has corn to export for the next 3 to 4 months.
USDA did reduce South America’s corn production for last year by 2 million mts (78.74 million bushels). When one considers the USDA reduced the U.S. 2024 corn crop by 276 million bushels in January and 60 million bushels in November, if all those bushels had been removed from the supply side of the S&D last summer like they should have been, the price action last year would have been significantly different.