The Pace Of US Soybean Exports

After weeks of large old crop export sales, things finally returned to more like normal for this time of year this week with the USDA announcing sales of "just" 237,400 MT. That's the equivalent of just under 9 million bushels.

For the entire marketing year the USDA have an export sales target of 1.240 billion bushels. IF sales from here on in only continue to run at 9 million bushels a week we would finish up with final ending stocks of just 65 million bushels by my calculations. That's half of what the USDA is currently projecting.

And that is based on weekly export sales of around 240,000 MT, over the last ten weeks old crop sales have averaged more than double that at 569,000 MT!

Weekly sales need to fall very sharply away over the remainder of the season to avoid ending stocks becoming perilously tight, especially in view of a potentially late harvest.