Agriculture production and demand are both down

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO (KRCU) - The United States Department of Agriculture released its August supply and demand estimates Thursday. The report reinforces what many already knew: It’s been a bad year for Missouri’s farmers.

The USDA’s World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates report shows projected corn yields are down by nearly 6 bushels per acre from last month’s estimate.

Soy bean projections are also down.

Michael Aide chairs Southeast Missouri State University’s Agriculture Department. Aide says soy beans are flowering and setting pods at the university's David M. Barton Agriculture Research Center. A good yield is still possible if certain conditions are met.

"What we need is favorable weather from this point out to keep the pods on the plant, to continue the flowering, to continue the grainfill of the pods that we have," Aide says. "We should have a respectable yield. But once again, we are irrigated. If you weren’t irrigated, you may have already had some yield reduction."

Aide says only about 45 percent of the Bootheel’s farmland is irrigated.

While supply is down in the U.S., global economic and political uncertainty are driving down demand.

Aide says this week’s downgrade of the U.S.'s AAA credit rating is adding even more uncertainty.

"I think there’s going to be less yields in the Missouri Bootheel and the prices may not be there that we had last year," Aide says. "Simply because if you watch the commodities lately, everybody is fleeing commodities with the stock market issues and so forth. And so prices are down a little bit in some places."

Production is up in Brazil, Ukraine and the European Union, thus driving down demand even further for U.S. corn.

The USDA estimates rice yields will increase slightly.

Jacob McCleland, KRCU

Posted in: agriculture,Michael Aide,Southeast Missouri State University,USDA