By Anthony Harrup
-- Wheat for March delivery settled up 0.8% on the Chicago Board of Trade at $5.33 1/2 a bushel, picking up after several days of losses on projections for strong global production.
-- Corn for March delivery rose 0.5% to $4.46 1/2 a bushel.
-- Soybeans for January delivery rose 0.2% to $10.93 1/2 a bushel.
HIGHLIGHTS
Wheat Rebound: Wheat futures shook off some early weakness and settled higher, recovering from losses in recent sessions on the global production outlook.
Production has been good in Northern Hemisphere countries and crops appear good in the Southern Hemisphere, Jack Scoville of the Price Futures Group said in a note. "Demand has been weaker for various origins including Russia."
Still, "the threat of additional bombings of freighters by either Russia or Ukraine kept futures supported to some extent," he added.
Promising Data: Export sales for the second week of November showed weekly gains in corn, wheat and soybeans, according to the USDA as it continued to release data delayed by the government shutdown.
Corn export sales for the week ended Nov. 13 rose to 2.38 million metric tons, up from 979,500 tons the week before. Wheat export sales were 850,400 tons, up from 462,500 tons the previous week, and soybean export sales rose to 695,600 tons from 510,600 tons.
INSIGHT
Catching Up: Market reaction to export sales for the week ended Nov. 13 was muted as the numbers are a month old, but "USDA is getting enough caught up now to give us some noteworthy trends," Arlan Suderman of StoneX said in a note.
Marketing year-to-date corn export sales put them on track to beat the USDA's record-high target, and while the recent pickup in Chinese buying should help narrow the soybean deficit, "the question remains on whether it will completely close the gap," he said. "The market is skeptical."
Corn for Ethanol: Randy Mittelstaedt of StoneX notes a slight decline in the use of sorghum for ethanol in recent months.
"While minor, each bushel of sorghum used in the ethanol production mix is essentially a bushel lost of corn demand so the recent trajectory of sorghum usage is pushing a bit more corn into the mix." Ethanol/corn yield has also slipped which "has the impact of requiring a bit more corn usage per gallon of ethanol produced," he added.
StoneX estimates that weekly ethanol production for the 2025-26 marketing year would need to average 1.115 million barrels a day to meet the USDA's 5.6 billion-bushel corn for ethanol usage estimate, or 3.8% more than last year's December-August production.
Ethanol producers crushed 476.4 million bushels of corn to make the fuel in October, up from 435.4 million bushels in September and from 463.6 million bushels in the year-earlier month, the USDA said.
AHEAD
-- The CFTC is scheduled to release its Commitments of Traders Report originally scheduled for Nov. 10 at 3:30 p.m. EST Friday.
-- The USDA is due to release its weekly export sales report covering the week ended Nov. 20 at 8:30 a.m. EST Monday.
-- The USDA is scheduled to release its weekly grain export inspections report at 11 a.m. EST Monday.
-- The USDA is due to release its monthly agricultural prices report at 3 p.m. EST Monday.
-- The CFTC is scheduled to release its Commitments of Traders Report covering the week ended Nov. 18 at 3:30 p.m. EST Tuesday.
Write to Anthony Harrup at anthony.harrup@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
12-11-25 1615ET
