Novembre/Dicembre, avevo scritto piu' volte che i grains a gennaio potevano ripartire...
Oggi il report di USDA li ha fatti balzare in su... ora sara' da verificare se è qualcosa di piu' serio o solo una occasione per fare trading.
Corn and wheat futures prices jumped after U.S. forecasters projected tighter-than-expected domestic supplies of the grains this year.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said farmers last year harvested slightly more corn than it previously expected amid the nation's worst drought in decades. However, the government said livestock and poultry producers are consuming corn at a higher rate than it had expected, which will result in historically tight supplies later this year.
The USDA, in a series of influential crop reports, also said wheat supplies will be smaller this year than analysts were expecting because of strong demand for wheat for animal feed.
Futures prices for corn, the biggest U.S. crop, recently were up 2.5% at $7.165. a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, trading at a three-week high. Wheat futures were up 2.9% at $7.6575 a bushel at the CBOT, a one-week high. Front-month soybean prices fell 0.1%, to $14.16 a bushel, after the USDA raised its estimate of soybean production last year by more than analysts had expected.
Last summer, U.S. corn prices soared to a nominal record close of $8.3125 a bushel as the drought punished crops in much of the Farm Belt, quashing expectations that farmers would produce the nation's largest-ever crop. Corn futures then tumbled as demand from foreign buyers and U.S. ethanol companies cooled at the higher prices. But Friday's reports provided fresh evidence of how tight U.S. corn supplies are, raising the prospect that prices could return again later this year to last summer's record levels.
The USDA said corn stockpiles as of Dec. 1 stood at 8.03 billion bushels, lower than the average analyst forecast of 8.21 billion in a Dow Jones Newswires poll.
The government lowered its forecast for corn exports in the crop year that ends Aug. 31, amid what it called "stiff competition" from competing exporters, such as Brazil. But due to domestic demand from the meat industry, it projected that corn supplies at the end of the crop year will be just 602 million bushels, down from its forecast last month of 647 million bushels and sharply lower than analyst forecasts.
Many traders were caught off guard by the USDA's increase in projected animal-feed usage, which it based on consumption rates in the livestock and poultry sectors this past fall. High feed prices have hurt livestock producer margins in recent months, leading many traders to assume they were cutting back on production.
"The big shocker is feed usage," said Doug Bergman, a trader and vice president at RCM Asset Management, a Chicago brokerage firm.
The USDA said the higher-than-expected domestic corn consumption is "expected to support continued strong and volatile [corn] prices well into summer."
The government said last year's corn yields, or bushels harvested per acre, turned out better than it previously expected. It raised the figure to 123.4 bushels, up from 122.3 previously. Total corn production was 10.78 billion bushels, above analyst forecasts, but still the smallest U.S. crop since 2006.
The USDA's tighter supply estimates for corn make it more important that U.S. farmers plant a big crop this coming spring. Drought conditions that have persisted since last summer in much of the country's heartland could threaten new crops if they don't improve further.
"Tight supplies have stayed," said Larry Glenn, an analyst at Frontier Ag, a commodities brokerage firm in Quinter, Kan. "That means not much room for error" for the next corn crop, he said.
Meanwhile, the USDA on Friday said farmers planted more winter wheat for the new crop year than for the 2012 crop year, although not as much as analysts expected. Planting of the crop, grown in states such as Kansas and Nebraska, occurred late last year.
Farmers planted 41.82 million acres with hard red winter, soft red winter and white winter wheat for 2013 harvest, about 1% more than in the previous crop year. Analysts were generally expecting a 3% bump in winter wheat planting.
The USDA cut its forecast for domestic wheat inventories on May 31, the end of the crop's marketing year, by 5% to 716 million bushels, a sharper decline than analysts had expected.
For soybeans, the government raised its estimate for last year's production, but the increase was generally expected, as rain late in the crop's growing season limited the impact of the drought.
U.S. farmers produced 3.015 billion bushels of soybeans last year, the USDA said Friday, up from the agency's December estimate of 2.971 billion bushels. The amount of land harvested by farmers and the average yield they got from the plants were both higher than expected, the USDA said.
Soybean yields averaged 39.6 bushels per acre, the USDA said, up from the 39.3 average it estimated a month ago.