Fundamentally Speaking

Despite talk that this week's corn rating would increase, this was not the case as late Monday afternoon, USDA reported that the percent in good or excellent was down another percentage point to 64%, the low of the year.

This chart looks at the week 34 (or end of August) crop ratings for the top 18 states and the U.S. using our usual ratings on the left-hand axis while the figure in light blue square is change from week 25 (or around the end of June) to week the 34 corn rating.

On the right-hand axis is the rank of both the week 34 rating and the rank in the change of week 25 to week 34 ratings from the period 2000 to 2022 with a figure of 1 being the best week 34 rating in this period and the largest positive change between week 25 and week 34 with 23 the worst week 34 rating and also the largest negative change between week 25 and week 34.

As discussed before, for 2022 the Plains states such as CO, KS, NE and TX along with southern states like KY and TN have the worst week 34 ratings as CO, NE, TN, and TX all have their third worst rating since 2000, KY seeing its second worst week 34 rating and KS its fourth worst.

All of these states have also seen large crop deterioration over the past two months with the KS rating having fallen by 214 points, the fourth largest decline since 2000 followed up by KY where its 168 point decline in crop ratings between weeks 25 and 34 is the largest drop since at least 2000.

Justifying Pro-Farmer's rather abysmal corn yield for South Dakota is fact that corn ratings fell by 118 points from the end of June to the end of August, its third largest decline since 2000.

In fact the only states that saw any improvement over the past two months was in IL, MN, OH and WI and that was just modestly.

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