📊 USDA's Shocking Acre Bets + Bill Gates' Farmland Fail, Berries Getting Baked, and more...

The USDA pulled out the hats and noisemakers on Wednesday and threw a big surprise party with the release of the annual acreage report.

Pre-party suspense: Leading up to the big reveal, market analysts suspected the USDA would report an uptick in planted acreage compared to farmers’ intentions announced in the March report.

But as is typical in the annual June release, the USDA wanted to send partygoers home with a little taste of the unexpected.

By the numbers:

92.7 million: estimated 2021 corn acres
87.6 million: estimated 2021 soybean acres
46.7 million: estimated 2021 wheat acres

All three crops were up by millions of acres compared to 2020. But corn and soybeans, typically the life of the party, shocked attendees as both were reported as being a million+ planted acres under market watchers’ predictions for this year.

The shockwave: When the lights came on, analysts sat wide-eyed and waited for the markets to respond.

And respond they did… like a bull in a china shop.

Lower acreage and grain stock estimates shot corn and soybean prices sky-high and left sellers reveling and celebrating Christmas in June. Corn futures closed 40 cents higher, its daily limit up, and soybean futures finished more than 90 cents higher. Whoa.

Where this goes: The status of grain stockpiles and the anticipated results of harvest season will likely cause more market volatility. However, long-term prices will likely be contingent upon one major factor: the weather.

Time will tell whether Mother Nature will be a gracious host or a disgruntled party crasher.

Quick Hits

→ 1K+ counties snag emergency status. The USDA has authorized 32% of the country’s counties to permit emergency haying and/or grazing on Conservation Reserve Program land due to growing drought conditions.

→ Sonny’s lil’ predicament. Ethics experts are questioning the $500K sale of a grain elevator from ADM to former Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue just weeks before his Senate confirmation. Various appraisals had valued the site between $2.4 million to $5.7 million.

→ Rural vets gone missing. Bipartisan lawmakers have introduced a new bill to eliminate taxes on the Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program to encourage veterinarians to work in underserved rural areas.

→ Dollars bee flowing. Beeflow, a crop pollination tech startup, raised an $8.3 million Series A round. The company’s technology has reduced the mortality rate of bees by up to 70%.

→ South America’s frostbite. Brazil and Paraguay were hit hard by overnight frosts this week, further damaging an already drought-stricken second corn crop.

→ A digital, smart-spraying duo. Now with a global green light from regulators, Bosch and BASF Digital Farming will begin selling their Smart Spraying and Intelligent Planting platforms in North America, South America, and Europe.

→ Syngenta planning a $60B ‘going-public’ party. Parent company ChemChina reportedly could file papers in Shanghai next week to take the ag firm public.

→ Togo could use a hand. The West African nation culled 800 birds and closed local poultry and feedstock markets for 30 days due to an outbreak of H5N1 avian bird flu.

Goin’ once, goin’ twice. Sold to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This week, Farmland Reserve, a company with ties to the Mormon Church, was the highest bidder for 33,000 acres of land in Benton County, Washington. The Mormon group’s $209 million bid beat out the second-highest bid, which came from a group linked to Bill Gates.

Sidebar: If you didn’t already know, Bill Gates is the top farmland owner in the U.S.

Back to the program: This land is the center of a fraud scandal involving rancher Cody Easterday. You may remember back in April when the rancher pled guilty to charges placed against him by Tyson Foods.

Easterday allegedly defrauded the company of $244 million in costs for buying and feeding ghost cattle. Ghost cattle = cattle that don’t exist. In addition to losing his farm and ranch, he also faces up to 20 years in prison.

The land sale isn’t finalized until a judge hits the gavel, expected to happen in August.

There are a lot of ways to stay in-the-know in the cattle industry.

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Understanding & Implementing EIDS
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If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the… whole U.S.?

Hot drought conditions have been dominating row crop headlines. But specialty crops are also getting hot, hot, hot while tens of thousands of workers are harvesting as much as 10 million pounds of fruit a day in the Northwest.

Record heat in the Northwest is throwing shade on berry and cherry harvests. This week, cherry farmers started harvesting at night to avoid the scorching 100-plus-degree weather. Farmers are using sprinklers and netting to reduce heat damage.

Cherries on the outer edges could see damage, but other than that, farmers are predicting the heat will have little impact on their crop.

Put it in perspective: Last year’s cherry crop reached 19.8 million cartons, and the Northwest Cherry Growers are projecting a 17% increase to 22.4 million 20-pound cartons. Cherry harvest is bringing the heat of its own.

Raspberries, on the other hand, are having a much more difficult time with the heat wave. Normally produced in cooler coastal areas where heat waves arrive after berry harvest, berry crops can face quality issues in the heat. Growers say they’ve already seen damages to their raspberry crop; meanwhile, blueberries seem to be sweating it out okay.

Apple harvest is still a few weeks away, but concerns for sunburnt, unmarketable apples are growing as well.

Time will tell how baked the Northwest fruit will get.