How Many U.S. Soybean Acres Needed in 2018
Listen to Todd Gleason’s full interview with U of I’s Todd Hubbs
Farmers in the United States have been planting more and more acres to soybeans. There is a simple reason behind this increase. Soybeans have been more profitable than other crops over the last several years. The question now is how many acres will they plant next year. University of Illinois Commodity Markets Specialist Todd Hubbs has been thinking about that one and he decided to determine how many acres are needed if the stocks-to-use ratio was to stay at about 7%.
Hubbs says that number should provide a $9.50 season’s average cash price, “If we assume seven-percent stocks-to-use in 2018/2019 would give us $9.50, which would cover the cost of production in Illinois based on current projections, how many acres of soybeans national under those assumptions would we need given a trend yield? Based on a trend yield of about 46.8 bushels to the acre, and it may be higher than that in 2018, we would need about 88.4 million harvested acres to get $9.50 based on a seven-percent stocks-to-use.”
If you use USDA’s long-term trend line yield for next year, 48.4 bushels to the acre, then the harvested acreage number must drop to about 85.4 million in order to get to the $9.50 season’s average cash price. That’s 86.2 million acres planted to soybeans in the United States next spring.