News

Corn stocks numbers surprise and confuse

Last week’s corn stocks number from the USDA, the last one from last year’s crop, was much bigger than expected. University of Illinois Ag Economist Darrel Good says the number was a surprise to the trade and was confusing to him.

“Being surprised is not all that unusual,” says Good, “But typically you can go back and reconstruct ‘where did we go wrong in anticipating the stocks number?’ and this time it’s pretty hard to do.”

Take the livestock feeding numbers, which the report says were 35% smaller than last year, “I just don’t have an answer at this point how we produced as much livestock as we did with as little feed that the stocks number would imply.”

Good says those numbers don’t add up for ethanol byproducts either, “We had a small increase in DDGs, year over year, but for the summer quarter that was three to four-percent. That really does not explain the drop in grain feeding.”

The Grain Stocks report is released each quarter of the fiscal year. It tallies, for the most part, how much of the previous year’s harvest has been used and what’s left to be used.

~IFR~