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Corn Sales Terrible

It's not easy to find many silver linings in the latest clouds hanging over the export market for U.S. corn. After all, net new bookings in the latest week totaled just 2.8 million bushels, according to the tally put out Thursday morning by USDA.

Still, 1 million bushels were picked up by China, though the business was previously allocated to unknown destinations. China also shipped out 8.7 million bushels, not bad for a country supposedly ready to harvest a record crop. Production estimates for China vary widely, with some there 15% lower than the official government forecast accepted by USDA recently.

And, while corn sales have dropped off a cliff recently, there were better this summer. As a result 32% of the government's forecast for the marketing year has already been sold or shipped two weeks into the marketing year, better than normal.

Wheat sales of 18 million bushels were slightly better than trade guesses, with shipments also picking up to 28.6 million. The bulk of the business was with regular customers in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Japan and Mexico dominate the list of those shipping out previous sales.

Hard red winter wheat led the list of wheat deals at 6.8 million bushels, but only 2.3 million were for soft red winter wheat.