Fundamentally Speaking

The USDA last Friday pegged the 2024 U.S. soybean yield at 51.7 bushels per acre (bpa) which is now tied with 2021 for second highest next to the 51.9 bpa peak seen in 2016.

It has now been eight years since the U.S. has seen a record high soybean yield which, next to the nine-year gap from 1994 to 2003, is the longest such streak at least since 1960.

As we will detail in forthcoming posts, it is thought that the soybean yields this year were negatively impacted by the exceptionally dry weather seen over the past ten weeks in much of the nation's key soybean producing areas, really from the middle of August until the last week of October that pared soybean pod seed weights.

Note that with the exception of Indiana, whose yield increased 2 bpa and North Carolina up 1 bpa, all other top producing soybean states saw yields unchanged or lowered.

The trade was looking for a lower soybean yield but not to the magnitude the USDA indicated as the yield was essentially steady over the past three reports at 53.2 bpa in the August numbers, the same in September and down just 0.1 bpa last month.

However, just 55% of the soybean samples had been processed in the USDA labs as of the October report vs 96% this month, so we have a much better sense now of where things stand.

This graphic shows that the per bushel decline of 1.4 from the October to November report plotted on the right-hand axis is the largest ever since USDA started reporting monthly soybean yield figures in 1965 and the third largest drop on a percentage basis next to 1993 and then 1984.

Those two seasons also saw a further yield decline into the final report in January and sentiment appears to be this will also happen for the 2024 crop year.

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