USDA Releases 'Disappointing' February WASDE

Feb 09, 2021

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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Video: Learning to Wrench From Dad the Hard Way

Harvest is a week out and the farm picked this week to fall apart. The truck needs a battery, the barn curtain's got a problem, and the corn and beans are telling us we're out of time to get it all fixed.

So it's a full day of wrenching. Tork supervises while I get the truck back running, then we're out at the hog barn where one rusted up part has the whole curtain system hung up. Ladder work, cable work, and a little dad-and-son disagreement about the right way to do it. We close it out walking the fields, shelling beans and checking corn, because whether everything's fixed or not, harvest starts when harvest starts.

Chapters: 00:00 Everything breaks the week before harvest 01:00 Tork supervises while I fix the truck 12:30 Out to the barn to find the curtain problem 14:30 One rusty part hung up the whole curtain 20:00 Running the curtain cable from the ladder 24:00 Walking the beans and corn before harvest 26:30 Wrapping up

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