Wednesday HOT TAKE

May 15

What’s HOT & What’s NOT

HOT

Plant progress is still a HOT topic, running top of mind especially as a soggy start to spring has presented plenty of challenges.

Even though Mother Nature has been less than cooperative, US corn almost reached the halfway point as of Sunday - 49% planted, up 13% from the week prior and 5% behind average.

State-by-state vs average:

As of Sunday, Illinois had the most corn acres to be planted at 6.3 million, followed by Iowa at 5.5 mil, Nebraska at 4.4 mil and South Dakota at 4.1 mil.

Perhaps we aren’t there yet but I wanted to take a look at final corn yields over the past decade as a percent of trend and compare them with planting progress for this particular week of the year (week 19).

First of all - we haven’t hit/exceeded so-called trend (USDA’s initial print) since 2018 and although 2023 was a record-high yield at 177.3 - it fell well-below the 181.5 trend.

In four of the past nine years, we saw new record national yields - which were also years we had more than 60% of the crop in the ground by week 19.

A few things: