In the overnight session the grains traded lower with December corn down 4 ¼ cents, November Soybeans down 5 ¼ cents and December Chicago wheat down 5 ½ cents after crop conditions came in better than expected in Monday afternoon’s report. Traders will be digesting yesterday afternoon’s crop conditions report and anticipating the NOPA crush report which will be released out at 11 AM CST today.
Expectations were for the good to excellent ratings to be steady this week for the Corn and Soybean crop. Corn ratings increased by two percentage points in the good to excellent category to 62 percent. States that saw improvement included South Dakota which was up 5 percent, North Dakota which was up 8 percent, Nebraska marked a 4 percent increase, Indiana was up 3 percent and Illinois was up 4 percent compared to last week. There was a 3 percent drop in Iowa and a 10 percent drop in Michigan good to excellent ratings in corn.
The soybean crop ratings declined by 1 percent in the good to excellent category to 59. Among the states that saw a deterioration in their soybean conditions was Iowa which was down 3 percent, Michigan which was down 7 percent and Illinois which was down 1 percent.
Spring Wheat rated good to excellent improved by 1 percent to 33 in this week’s report. This improvement was in line with expectations as crop condition improvements were observed across Idaho, Minnesota, Montana and North Dakota. Despite the slight uptick in crop conditions the spring wheat crop is still well below the good to excellent rating of 66 during the same period last year.
Spring wheat harvest has advanced to 40 percent complete up from 24 percent the week before. The four year average is 35 percent harvested during the same week last year.
The NOPA crush report which will contain the data of 13 companies that account for approximately 95 percent of US soybean crush will be released out 11 AM CST this morning. In a Reuters poll of analysts the average guess is for the report to show 143.004 million bushels crushed.
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