The US soybean balance sheet is becoming more interesting given the incredible pace of export sales over the past two months. Since the export sales report for the week ended September 4th, we have sold a total of 456 million bushels of soybeans for the current marketing year. As usual, it’s all about China; they have single handedly purchased 758,896,732 bushels of the known destination sales. And, the fact of the matter is that most if not all of the unknown destinations are also bound for Chinese ports. Add those in and their total purchases are 982,215,348 bushels or, nearly 80% of US sales.
What does this mean for US soybeans? At the present pace, in order to meet USDA export projection of 1.7 billion bushels for the 2014/15 marketing year, we only need to average 715,729.7 MT per week until the end of February. And, since there is generally some carryover into March and beyond before the South American crop takes over, weekly average sales will likely need to be even lower than that.
The bottom line is that it wouldn’t be surprising to see a revision in future WASDE reports if we continue to sell beans at our current rate. The soybean balance sheet seems to present a conundrum every year for USDA statisticians, in our opinion this year is shaping up to be no different. Despite the huge production, it is conceivable that the current 450 million bushel ending stocks figure is actually, too big.
What does this mean for US soybeans? At the present pace, in order to meet USDA export projection of 1.7 billion bushels for the 2014/15 marketing year, we only need to average 715,729.7 MT per week until the end of February. And, since there is generally some carryover into March and beyond before the South American crop takes over, weekly average sales will likely need to be even lower than that.
The bottom line is that it wouldn’t be surprising to see a revision in future WASDE reports if we continue to sell beans at our current rate. The soybean balance sheet seems to present a conundrum every year for USDA statisticians, in our opinion this year is shaping up to be no different. Despite the huge production, it is conceivable that the current 450 million bushel ending stocks figure is actually, too big.
