Fundamentally Speaking
Record Corn Ear Weights
U.S. corn futures have been on quite a run, now trading at the highest levels since May of last year as less domestic supply, better demand, and now increasing concern about potential size of Brazil's second season crop have all been supportive factors.
As noted in a prior blog piece, the final crop production report earlier this month was a real shocker as both 2024 U.S. corn and soybean yields pared sharply from what had been indicated in the November report.
There is now no doubt that an exceptionally dry finish to growing season in most of the key corn and soybean states really took a toll.
The USDA corn yield at 179.3 bushels per acre (bpa) was down 3.8 bpa from the November estimate and that is the third largest bpa decline between the November and January report since the November corn estimate was started in 1974, next to what was seen in 1993 and 2020, and the second largest drop in percent terms next to 2020.
Still, it was a record yield and looking at the 10-state objective corn ear population data, the reason being was the heaviest corn ear weights in history that offset a lower corn ear population than the year prior.
Corn yields are based on the number of ears per acre and the weight of each ear with rising figures for both resulting in higher yields and vice versa.
This chart shows the 10-state objective corn ear population in ears per acre on the left-hand axis while reported on the right-hand axis is the implied corn ear weight in pounds per ear.
We also show in the yellow boxes the 10-state weighed yield using the data from the ten objective states. The final corn ear population is pegged at 28,706 ears per acre and that is down from the year prior 29,372 ears/acre.
An interesting side note is though the U.S. has seen back-to-back years of record corn yields, both are actually below the 25-year trend as corn yields appear to be plateauing similar to what we have seen with soybean yields where a new national yield record has not been set since 2016.
It could be that the long-term growth in corn plant and ear populations is slowing as from 2004 to 2014 ear populations increased by an annual average of 236 per season but from 2014 to 2024 that has slowed to just a yearly increase of 24 ears per acre.
The other part of the equation is the weight of each year and that is tied more into growing conditions, specifically temperature and precipitation during the key developmental months especially in July.
Last year in many of the key corn growing states, temperatures in July were actually below normal and rainfall about average and this resulted in the final 10-state implied ear weight of 0.3659 pounds per ear.
This is the highest weight ever, surpassing what was seen the prior top two seasons of 2016 and 2017.
As a final note, in order to calculate the 10-state objective yield weight you need harvested acre figures but the USDA did not include this data for the November crop production report until 2012.
What is interesting is we calculated the 10-state objective yield weight for both the November and final crop reports from 2012 to 2014 and this year's 0.227% drop in weight between the two reports is the largest percent decline since 2012 as again it does appear the dry finish to this year's corn growing season did take the top end of what still was a record U.S. and ten-state yield.
(c) Copyright 2025 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.
Comments
To comment, please Log In or Join our Community .