USDA Outlook Forum

The USDA's February's Annual Agricultural Outlook Forum, is usually a pretty good guide to what US farmers might eventually plant each spring. I just did a quick check back to what the USDA came out with last February, to see how close to the final numbers they got. Back then they pegged the all wheat area at 58 million acres, corn at 86 million and beans at 77 million. Not too bad a guess compared to the final area of 59.1 million acres of wheat, 86.4 million acres of corn and 77.5 million acres of beans.

This year they are pegging US all wheat acres at 53.8 million (down 9%), corn area at 89 million (up 3%) and the soybeans area at 77 million (down less than 1%).

The numbers are not dramatically different to Informa, who said in January that US farmers would plant 89.65 million acres of corn this year, 77.92 million acres of soybean and 53.79 million acres of wheat.