Chicago Board of Trade corn futures closed lower on Thursday on speculative long liquidation and positioning ahead of the release early Friday of a key government seedings and stocks report. Position-squaring was dominating dealings ahead of the release early Friday of USDA's March plantings and quarterly stocks reports.
An average of 25 analysts' pegged this year's US corn plantings at 94.720 million acres (38.33 million hectares), the most since 1944. And US quarterly stocks of corn on March 1 at 6.150 billion bushels, the smallest in five years. The July/December was at 79-1/4 and the December corn/November soyabean ratio was at 2.49.
Prospects for normal crop weather in the US heartland combined with the largest planted area in almost seven decades could lead to a record large corn crop of nearly 14.0 billion bushels, an agricultural meteorologist said. Light rainfall and warm temperatures were expected to continue blanketing the US Midwest and Plains grain and soyabean growing areas for the next week to 10-days which will boost prospects for the 2012 crop production. Private Chinese importers have bought six cargoes, or about 360,000 tonnes, of US corn for shipment in May and June from the US Pacific Northwest in the first large sale to the country since late February, trade sources said.
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