Numbers down from last year in what is the lowest average yield in 17 years
By Jim Suhr
AP Business Writer
ST. LOUIS (AP) — The federal government slashed its expectations for U.S. corn and soybean production for the second month in a row as the worst drought in decades continues punishing key farm states.
The U.S. Agriculture Department on Friday cut its projected U.S. corn production to 10.8 billion bushels, down 17 percent from its forecast last month of nearly 13 billion bushels and 13 percent lower than last year. That also would be the lowest production since 2006.
The USDA, in its monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, now expects corn growers to average 123.4 bushels per acre, down 24 bushels from last year in what would be the lowest average yield in 17 years.
Soybean production is now forecast at 2.69 billion bushels, a 12 percent decline from last year and well off the 3.05 billion bushels the USDA had expected last month. Expected yields on average of 36.1 bushels per acre would be the lowest since 2003.
Friday’s revised outlook comes months after corn farmers expected this to be a record year when they planted, sowing 96.4 million acres — the most since 1937. But the USDA now forecasts the area to be harvested to be 87.4 million acres.
The USDA had somewhat foreshadowed the newly lowered expectations, noting earlier this week that exactly half of the nation’s corn crop was rated poor to very poor, up 2 percentage points from the previous week and creeping closer to the peak of 53 percent of 24 years ago. Some 39 percent of soybeans now fall under those two categories, rising 2 percentage points for the second straight week and eclipsing the 1988 benchmark of 37 percent.
The nation’s rangeland and pastures are faring even worse, with roughly three-fifths rated to be in poor to very poor shape — the largest area thus affected in 18 years.
The report amplified the troubling picture already painted a day earlier, when the latest weekly U.S. Drought Monitor map showed that the drought conditions in Plains states where production of corn and soybeans is key continue to worsen. That update showed that the expanse still gripped by extreme or exceptional drought — the two worst classifications — rose to 24.14 percent, up nearly 2 percentage points from the previous week.
That’s because key farm states didn’t get as much benefit from rains as elsewhere on the heels of temperatures in July that federal scientists said were so high they broke a record set during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday that this year’s first seven months were the warmest on record for the nation while the stretch from August 2011 through July this year was the balmiest 12-month period on record.
According to the latest Drought Monitor map, growers in Iowa — the nation’s biggest corn and soybean producer — saw their conditions further deteriorate. Such dry conditions have factored into a sharp rise in global food prices after three months of decline, the U.N.’s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization said in its monthly price report. The FAO said its overall food price index climbed 6 percentage points in July, although it was well below the peak reached in February 2011.
The U.S. leads the world in exporting corn, soybeans and wheat, and the surging prices are expected to be felt across the international marketplace, hurting poor food-importing countries.
