Monday, July 16, 2012

Lost another 4 bushels in corn and 1 bushel in soybeans



Dropped another 4 bushels of corn and 1 bushel of soybeans. I keep having to change the scale on the corn yield graph as it goes lower and lower. Please consider the post before this one and how my use of absolute deviations (vs percent deviations) from normal yields and how some may think this will end up giving be a distorted estimate of yields Notice too that harvested area is beginning to fall, that is why when yields fell 2.8% this week production fell by 3.4% as I dropped a half million acres out of harvesting. This can actually stabilize yields all else equal (which it usually isn't). I mentioned the difference between absolute and percent deviations which will be tested this year, but also, I've never been able to get any significance out of the condition data on corn harvesting in Iowa, but I can visually observe that in 1988 the harvesting rate was 94.6% while the 1986-2011 average is 97.1%.   There has even been a slight upward trend over time. The result for me is that I have a 97.7% harvesting rate for Iowa. So there is the potential for a few percentage point cuts in production in Iowa on this issue. The same is true for Illinois (no trend in Illinois but the harvesting rate in 1988 was 96.9% and the long run average from1986-2011 is   98.3%. The same holds for Indiana where harvesting rates are NOT condition driven. I simply haven't been able to get any significance out of the data, but I bet this won't be the case next year. For some states I do have condition variables which are significant so harvesting rates in Nebraska have fallen from 98.1% of planted acres several weeks ago to 95.7% in the most recent week. This will often give you a larger decline in production than in the estimated yield. Missouri shows a similar decline from 96.6% to  95.1% over the same period. 

Corn Yield:  141.9 bu/ac
Corn Production:  12,350 million bushels

Soybean Yield:  38.0 bu/ac
Soybean Production: 2,839 million bushels

Cotton Yield:  806 lbs/ac
Cotton Production 18.875 million bales


GREEN DOTS are trade estimates at the time they were issued








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