Gro Models Predict Tight US Corn Supplies After Upcoming Harvest

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With the start of the US corn harvest just two weeks away, Gro models indicate that new crop corn production will provide only modest relief for tight corn supplies both in the US and around the world. 

Gro’s US Corn Yield Forecast Model currently projects a national yield of 175.75 bushels per acre, which suggests a corn stocks-to-use ratio, a measure of available supply, at one of the lowest levels since 2013. While Gro’s yield forecast improved slightly over the past week, it is down 2% from early August, mainly on declines in South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska. 

View Gro’s US Corn Monitor Display that aggregates a wide range of corn information, including yield forecasts, futures prices, stocks-to-use ratios, and Gro’s interactive US Corn Balance Sheet, which allows users to input their own estimates to see the impact on supply & demand.

Yields across the Corn Belt are varying widely this year, as was highlighted during the 2021 Digital Yield Tour, a partnership between Gro and DTN. Most of the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa continue to be hit by considerable drought, as shown via the Gro Drought Index, while conditions are favorable in most of the Eastern Corn Belt.  

 A fresh round of rains forecast for the Midwest and Plains later this week is likely too late to recover top yields lost due to summer drought stress. Some 59% of the US corn crop is in its dent stage, just shy of physiological maturity, and late-season rains aren’t likely to boost yield.

Still, rains will provide some relief to parched soil conditions in the Western Corn Belt. Remnants of Hurricane Ida could also bring rain to some Eastern Corn Belt states, but this is more likely to benefit soybeans than corn. The US corn harvest typically begins in mid-September, with Southern states starting earlier.  

The US is the largest producer and consumer of corn, accounting for a third of the world’s corn production. Demand for US corn following this year’s harvest will be even greater than usual, after ongoing drought in Brazil, the No. 2 corn exporter, reduced that country’s corn crop by 15%

The Gro US Corn Yield Forecast Model is part of Gro’s suite of machine-learning models that estimate in-season yields on a daily basis. The US Corn Model, which provides forecasts at the county level and aggregates them to the state and national levels, uses spatially explicit weather, vegetative health, and soil data to monitor environmental and crop conditions during the growing season and continuously forecast final yield.

This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.

 

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