Highlights
The USDA will issue its Quarterly Grain Inventory and Small Grains Reports at 10 AM Mountain Time today. The corn and bean inventory numbers will be the 2022 crop carryover and will indicate what demand will be into the end of the calendar year.
The scuttlebutt is that China bought 500,000 to 1 million mts of corn from Ukraine over the past two weeks for October-December shipment. Roger expected China to buy a very large amount of corn no later than the first week in October, but did not expect it to be from Ukraine. None-the-less, there is still a reasonable expectation China will buy a lot of US corn. China has already bought all the corn Brazil could get loaded on ships before bean harvest starts in January, Argentina has no corn to export as they are importing corn from Brazil, and USDA has China importing 23 million mts of corn this year, up from 18.5 million mts last year.
The USA did ship 730,000 mts of corn during the week ending Thursday a week ago, 139,700 mts of which went to China. For the first three weeks of this marketing year, corn export sales and shipments are more than a year ago and more than the five year average, but we have 49 weeks to go.