USDA Set for First Crop Data Release Since September

By Ryan Hanrahan

Reuters’ Karl Plume and Julie Ingwersen reported that “a crop data blackout during the longest-ever U.S. government shutdown has led to the widest range of analyst estimates in a decade for corn and soybean yields, as an information vacuum at harvest time and during critical trade negotiations distorted the market for the country’s two most valuable crops.”

“The U.S. government reopened on Thursday after the 43-day shutdown. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is set to release a hotly anticipated crop report, including the government’s first estimates of the two feed crops since mid-September, before the harvest had taken shape,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “In the absence of last month’s world agriculture supply and demand estimates report, traders have relied on disparate bits of data to take positions.”

“Buyers and analysts have examined harvest estimates from private forecasters, media reports about export sales, local cash market prices, and social media posts showing overflowing grain bins in some parts of the country and ample storage space in others,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “None of this, however, gives as definitive a picture as the USDA report.”

“In September, USDA projected the largest corn and soybean yields on record and the largest harvested area for corn since the Great Depression. But in the absence of updated government data, analyst consensus has been building that the two crops’ harvest will come in smaller than projected,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “Analysts with farm lender CoBank warned of an acute crop storage shortage, but grain piles never materialized in many areas. In October, buyers in some locations began bidding up the cash price for crops, reinforcing ideas that the harvest had fallen short.”

“The USDA told Reuters that its staff collected crop field samples despite the shutdown,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “Lance Honig, an official with the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the statistical methodology for estimating national yields had not changed and the agency was ‘collecting the necessary survey and administrative data to support the forecasts.’”

USDA Set to Release Daily Export Data, Too

Reuters’ Plume and Ingwersen reported that “the USDA also suspended crop export sales reporting during the shutdown, although it was still gathering the data, according to its shutdown plan.”

“The USDA released data missed in the first week of the shutdown on Thursday and set a schedule for the weekly reports that were suspended in the weeks that followed to be published through the end of the year,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “The agency is also due to release a compiled list of large daily sales reported by exporters during the shutdown on Friday.”

“The blackout coincided with trade negotiations with China, which accounts for 50% to 60% of all U.S. soybean exports. The U.S. ships about two-thirds of the oilseed, its most valuable farm export, between October and January,” Plume and Ingwersen reported. “Buyers other than China have booked U.S. soybean shipments during the shutdown. But without weekly government confirmation of sales, estimates of demand have varied significantly.”

Analyst WASDE Estimates

Progressive Farmer’s Rhett Montgomery reported that “the average of analysts’ estimates (according to 17 firms surveyed by Dow Jones) for Friday for the 2025 corn yield is 183.5 bushels per acre (bpa), ranging from 182 to 186 bpa. This would be a drop of 3.2 bpa from the September estimate, although undoubtedly larger than some studies through harvest have found.”

“Analysts expect harvested corn area to remain estimated at 90 million acres across the U.S., the largest since 1933, if true, bringing production to an average trade guess of 16.528 billion bushels (bb),” Montgomery reported. “Analyst estimates ranged from 16.38 bb to 16.75 bb, all over 1 bb larger than the previous U.S. record set in 2023.”

“Since the last round of USDA data in September, the soybean market has been on a roller coaster, with escalating tensions between China and the U.S. initially sending prices back toward calendar-year lows,” Montgomery reported. “Then, the trade truce announcement, which included soybean purchase promises by China, sent January futures to 16-month highs over the second half of October.”

“The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Dow Jones calls for a soybean yield of 53 bpa, half a bushel less than the September report, but still a record for the U.S,” Montgomery reported. “However, if true, this would cut production by roughly 45 million bushels (mb) from the previous estimate.”

USDA Set for First Crop Data Release Since September was originally published by Farmdoc.