Fundamentally Speaking

Next week is the 101st USDA Ag Outlook Forum and trade is already talking about how corn will need to steal some acreage from soybeans this coming year as rather snug U.S. and quite tight global corn stocks is a far different situation than what is seen as record world soybean supplies.

Prospective per acre returns for each are not that spiffy so it is unlikely that total acreage of both will increase so corn prices staying high relative to soybeans to encourage that shift.

Again, these are early season projections as the first official 2025/26 balance sheets won't be released till the May 2025 WASDE report.

Nonetheless it is always interesting to see how USDA's first stab at S&D numbers match up to what actually transpires.

Along these lines, this chart shows the percent change between the USDA Ag Outlook projections for corn and the final estimates for exports, yield and average farm price on the left-hand axis while the percent difference for ending stocks is plotted on the right-hand axis.

In the rectangle we also report the summary statistics for the period 1998-2024 for these three variables plus the food-seed-industrial category (FSI), planted area and the feed/residual.

These include the average percent differential, the standard deviation of these annual percent changes and how these variables correlate with the average farm price.

Keep in mind that the Ag Outlook figures are released mid to late February each year, but the final WASDE projections are issued the following November, more than 18 months later, so needless to say the situation can change greatly over the marketing year and also note this year's 2024/25 figures are using this month's USDA WASDE figures.

As noted in a prior piece, the current 1.540 billion bushel (bb) carryout for this marketing year is down 39% from the 2.532 bb USDA estimated a year ago as ending stocks.

This is the highest standard deviation at 41.5% of any of these variables as that is dependent on production which is based on acreage and yields and demand where exports much more volatile than either FSI or feed.

Seeing for the past five years ending stocks have come in lower than what was estimated at the Ag Outlook sessions with one reason being that the USDA has projected corn yields higher than what was actually produced for the past six seasons in a row.

(c) Copyright 2025 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.