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Report showed more wheat feeding

One reason given for the higher-than-expected corn number in Monday’s quarterly stocks report from USDA was more feeding of wheat to livestock this summer—more than analysts expected.

“We certainly knew there were price incentives to feed wheat, but there was a smaller hard red winter wheat crop which usually reduces that feeding,” says USDA grains analyst Jerry Norton.  “Still, we had a very strong feeding residual number for wheat, which is an offset in some ways to the corn feeding residual for that quarter.”

And Norton found another interesting twist in the report’s numbers.

“Farmers, particularly in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and some of those areas where they had pretty good—better—corn last year, held on to some of those stock they had in bins,” he says. “So that just left a lot more corn on farms than people expected going into this report.”

On-farm stocks of corn were down 12 percent with off-farm stocks down 19 percent from a year ago.