9/1/2021

Corn and soybeans end another day a chunk lower with managed money continuing to liquidate their long positions ahead of harvest.  Along with our seasonal downtrend, it's hard to find anything to stimulate this market to make a move higher.  It's estimated that hurricane Ida has left the gulf export terminals in poor enough condition that they will likely not be shipping anything out for close to 30 days.  The elephant in the room during the planting and growing seasons is that the USDA has severely understated corn acres on the planting intentions and grain stocks reports.  I personally predicted 94 million acres of corn planted this year with an ending stocks number of 1.8 billion bushels for the 2021 crop back in March.  The USDA increased corn acres by 1.1 million to a total of 93 million acres in the June report.  Today, Reuters threw up another red flag, reporting that the USDA is reviewing the corn and soybean acre data for the September WASDE report.  This is a month earlier than they typically would do this and the USDA claims it has "sufficiently complete" data to go ahead with this.  Continue to watch the spreads for opportunity to roll your hedges out and pick up the carries on the board.  Soybeans spreads for this year's crop were printing record contract lows today and the time may be right to roll some November out into January.  Corn spreads appear to have some potential to weaken further.