Corn planting is running well above normal across the country, fueling speculation that this year’s crop could be huge. USDA reported that this week that 7% of the nation’s corn crop is now planted – more than double normal for this time of year.

Progress in some Midwestern states has already hit double digits. Missouri has 23% of the crop planted compared to the five-year average of 8%, and Illinois is at 17% where just 3% is normal. Huge gains were seen from the previous week in states like Tennessee, which jumped from 15% to 46% planted in a week, while Kentucky went from 5% to 32%.

Normally, only 10 of the 18 top corn states have corn in the ground by this time of year, but right now only North Dakota and Wisconsin have nothing to report.
 
Doing the math on the USDA Prospective Planting report predicting almost 96 million acres of corn this year and using only the five-year average corn yield of 154.3 bu./acre, there is the potential for a 14.8-billion-bu. crop.

“Certainly if we have a trend yield, we’ll see record production and we should see substantial rebuilding of stocks,” says Joe Glauber, USDA chief economist. “We were calculating with even 94 million acres we would see almost a doubling of stock yields.”

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