Your loyal scribe managed to complete my soybean harvest last week. It was quite a battle especially after thanksgiving as rainy, gloomy and gray weather kept me out of the fields. It turned out to be about what I expected double digits yields higher than last year when everything burned up in my fields. It was quite a summer, full of smoke but the hazy sunshine must have had an effect on soybean yield. Ditto for my corn.

Last Monday I started harvesting corn and it is quite high in moisture for this time of year about 28 and 29%.  My agricultural economic mind keeps thinking about the cost of drying that corn.  Of course, I wonder why it is so high in moisture. Apparently, this part of Ontario is behind about two weeks in heat units and when you combine that with the hazy sunshine caused by northern Canadian smoke, we got wet corn this fall. That harvest battle will continue into next week.

Interestingly enough, we’ve got some big yields in Ontario, but we also have big yields in the United States after a very uneven growing season filled with haze and smoke. Today we had the release of the November WASDE report, that monthly look at markets by the US government which has all the trading algorithms dialed in. What the USDA found was more corn and soybeans than was expected.

The USDA raised 2023/2024 domestic corn production by 1.9 bushels per acre to 174.9 bushels per acre.  This 170 million bushel increase in corn production put total production at 15.234 billion bushels and if realized will break the 2016 record for the biggest US corn crop ever. That’s not bad for a smoky summer across North America. I even had one of my agronomist friends tell me this past week that there’s lots of sulfur in that smoke which is good for corn production.

I’m not sure about the sulfur part of that equation and whether he was kidding me or not. However, the US made their estimates on 87.1 million harvested acres. Ending stocks for 2023/2024 were increased 45 million bushels to 2.156 million bushels.  On the demand side of the equation feed was at 5.65 billion bushels, industrial use was at 6.740 billion bushels and ethanol was increase 25 million bushels to 5.325 billion bushels. This put domestic usage to 12.390 billion bushels.

At the end of the day December corn responded by reverting back to its September low of $4.68 a bushel. I know that this is disappointing to many Ontario producers, who are open for better things, but it’s more of a classic corn price low at harvest season. We haven’t seen that in a couple of years but here we are. Big supply as I said a month or two ago has won the day.

Soybeans remain the great liars. Last month we saw a decrease in yield from soybeans.  This time USDA said in the November report that the crop is actually supposed to come in at 49.9 bushels per acre up a third of a bushel from last month. How does that happen?  Well, it’s just that soybeans are difficult to judge on yield and here we are. Total domestic soybean production is set to come in at 4.13 billion bushels and all these supply estimates were within the pre report estimates. Unfortunately, the algorithms got what they needed with that news and soybeans were down $0.22 on the day.

On the wheat side of the ledger, the USDA actually raised Russia’s wheat production 5 million metric tonnes to 90 million metric tonnes but at the same time they lowered world production by 1.4 million metric tonnes.  I’m sure that this did not cause wild excitement within Ontario wheat growers. However, we are always grasping at straws in the wheat market, and we did see a technical change in the bearish momentum for December Chicago wheat last week.  I guess we could call that hope although I’ve often told you that hope should never be part of a marketing plan.

With all of these bearish market factors we have Ontario prices at approximately $17 for soybeans, $5.60 for corn and for the wheat planted in the ground this fall in Ontario it should be worth about $7.50 next July. We can thank our Canadian dollar currently fluttering around $0.73 US.  Some of you might think that this is all not bad but keep in mind as we look ahead the USDA will probably be changing these numbers into January. We also have the Brazilian crop that is growing actively in the southern hemisphere and the proverbial wild cards are still there in Ukraine and Gaza.

We know that in fall of 2023 there were many marketing opportunities in the rear-view mirror. We also know that we never look back.  There likely will be many marketing opportunities ahead. The hard part is knowing when they’ll be.