U.S. Planting Making Good Pace

May 14, 2020

U.S. farmers have been making good progress with spring seeding.

We spoke to FarmLink Chief Market Analyst Neil Townsend earlier this week.

"Significantly faster rate than last year," he said. "In terms of corn progress they're 67% planted, that's up week on week by about 16% but the better news from a U.S. corn farmer standpoint is that last year at this time they were only 28% complete. They're ahead of the five-year pace...Soybeans are also doing way better than last year, 38% complete. Last year at this time only 8% complete."

However, Townsend says cooler weather has slowed down U.S. spring wheat planting in some areas.

"It is proceeding a little bit slowly. I'm not sure if the cold weather necessarily throws people off or what is the particular reason but I guess they want a certain soil temperature and they're not quite getting it, so it's proceeding slowly. We've had that cold weather in Western Canada as well."

He notes the some of the U.S. winter wheat has been deteriorating over the past few weeks due challenging weather conditions.

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