USDA: Ag Trade No Barometer This Year

Comparing the pace of U.S. agricultural exports with last season's pace may not be as reliable a way of forecasting exports as in the past.  In so called 'normal' trade years analysts can pretty accurately forecast commodity exports based on the pace of those exports to date.  Are they running behind or ahead of the year before?  But USDA's Outlook Board Chairman, Seth Meyer says using this pace analysis may not work so well this season.

"For instance in soybeans it may very well be that we're going have to find markets other than China.  Those markets other than China tend to buy more in the second half of the year than the first half of the year, so who you're selling to in the bean market may very well change the pace of sales within a given year."

And when looking at wheat.

"Everybody's on the edge of their seat to see when the Russians might stop exporting, and so you may have a very different pace early than late in the season, so I think this is one of the years where doing a simple pace analysis that looks at this year's pace compared to last year is probably not the best you can do."

And could be very misleading.

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