Planting Pace Jumps Higher Than Expected

Grains Gave Up Yesterday's Gains in the Overnight Session

October 2, 2020

Grains gave up yesterday's gains in the overnight session as planting pace jumped higher than expected.

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USDA’s crop progress report showed corn planting at 17% completed, up from 6% planted last week and higher than expectations of 15% going into the report. This slightly below the 18% pace on the 5-year average but well off last year’s plantings of 28%. Soybeans came in at 6% planted, up from 3% last year and the 5-year average. Winter wheat condition was unchanged from last week at 54% good-to-excellent.

China's 2017 planned acreage dedicated to soybeans will go up 8.1% while the planned acreage dedicated to corn will drop 4%, according to survey results from the National Bureau of Statistics published on Monday. The nation's planned acreage dedicated to wheat in 2017 will go down 0.8%. For March, China soy imports were 6.3 MMT, that’s slightly above the 6.1 MMT imports in March 2016. Q1 imports tallied a record high of 19.5 MMT.

In the export arena, the recent slide in the US Dollar is starting to slant the trade more to the US in relative commodity pricing. This is especially true for wheat vs Europe where the Euro has shown sharp gains in recent days following the election primary in France. Corn prices in Brazil continue to trade at a hefty discount to the US. This morning Iraq was tendering for 50,000 MT of wheat to be sourced from Canada, the US or Australia.

WORLD EXPORT PRICE SPREADS RELATIVE TO US

Crop	Country	Today	Last Week	Last Year
CRN	ARG	+$3.1	+$3.1	+$2.0
CRN	BRZ	-$16.1	-$16.0	-$18.2
CRN	EUR	+$9.7	+$8.8	-$19.2
SBN	ARG	-$12.3	-$15.8	-$10.3
SBN	BRZ	+$1.7	+$1.0	+$2.1
WHT	ARG	+$16.4	+$11.9	+$0.5
WHT	EUR	-$11.8	-$16.7	-$55.3