Weather and Market Commentary: November 10, 2009

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Weather and Market Commentary: November 10, 2009

November 10, 2009 by sabrina829

Tuesday, November 10, 2009:

Last week was easily the biggest week of this fall season for harvesting soybeans, and this week will likely be the second-biggest. At 75 percent done nationally, that was a 23 percentage-point rise from the previous week but still left this year’s pace well behind last year and the five-year average (and still made this year’s soybean harvest one of the slowest in the past 30 years). With good weather for much of this week in major growing areas of the Nation though, I think that next week’s report will show the national soybean harvest right around 90 percent done. 37 percent of the Nation’s corn crop had been cut as of this past Sunday, by far the slowest pace in the past 30 years (50 percent complete as of November 8, 1992 was the previous low) and 45 percentage points slower than the five-year average. Even with farmers finishing the soybean harvest and thus able to concentrate on corn, it is going to be a slow corn harvest due to how wet the crop is in the fields (still lots and lots of reports of corn that is testing over 30 percent moisture even here in the middle of November).

As late as the corn crop was this year, there was no way that we were going to get “all” of that crop to maturity before the first frost. Using similar thinking, as slow as this year’s harvest is, it would probably be best to accept the fact that “all” of this year’s corn crop will not be harvested before the first big snowstorm, and the fact that we will be harvesting corn next spring. I think those are pretty easy statements to make when one considers that just three percent of the North Dakota corn crop had been cut as of November 8. Leaving corn through the winter has certainly happened before; 17 percent of the Nation’s corn crop remained in the field on December 6, 1992, and I clearly remember seeing combines rolling in the spring of 1993. That said, it does remain a favorable weather forecast coming up. We are going to see precipitation moving through the Corn Belt for the end of this week through early next week, bringing an end to what has been for some areas close to two weeks of completely dry weather. That weather should be followed by several days of dry weather for the middle and latter parts of next week, with temperatures then staying very mild (particularly in the northwestern Corn Belt and northern Plains, thus limiting the threat of snow or at the very least limiting how long any snow that does fall is able to stay on the ground).