USDA Releases 'Disappointing' February WASDE

The USDA released its February World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report Tuesday morning.

 

Dan Basse is president of AgResource Company in Chicago.

 

"The USDA, in their February nature, and it's usually a month of not very big changes, left things a little disappointing for the markets in Chicago. They only raised U.S. corn imports by 50 million bushels, leaving stocks at 1.5 billion bushels. They raised soybean exports 20 million bushels, leaving stocks there at 120 million bushels but everything else including U.S. wheat was unchanged."

 

Basse also commented on the world stage.

 

"They did cut the world wheat end stocks about 9 million metric tons. They raised Chinese feed use to 304 million metric tons. They've been selling a lot of wheat out of reserve in China. That's of course been going into the feed channel. Other than that, they raised Chinese corn imports to 24 million metric tons, that was versus 17.5 last month but again traders here in Chicago are left wandering, if they raised China's corn imports that much, why didn't the U.S. participate. Probably Ukraine and Brazil were sellers of some corn to China, but surely not enough to make up that USDA total."

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