Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | It's that time of year to again become obsessed with planted acres predictions and the like.
Yesterday we saw Allendale's prospective plantings predictions. Has any other service also published?
It is in that spirit that I got curious as to how successful such predictions have been so I went looking for some data. Since Allendale and the private services don't keep their previous year's predictions available about the only source is the USDA. I could have compared March prospective plantings with the June planted acres report but there is as much uncertainty in the June report as the March report. So I choose end of year harvested acres by then the USDA has had a good nine months to collected repeated surveys. Hopefully by Dec they will get a pretty solid answer. Besides what we are really interested in is production and production has two components, harvested acres and yield. (You have already seen my comments on yield below under the planted acreage thread.)
So I plotted harvested acres vs prospective plantings for both corn & soybeans for 2003 to 2013. A couple of interesting observations. First for corn, the relationship between corn prospective plantings and harvested acres is much stronger than for soybeans. It makes sense, farmers plant their corn then if they still can they plant soybeans.
Second, from the regression equation you can see that pretty consistently 90% of the prospective corn planting is harvested for grain with a little surprise. An extra million acres of corn harvested for grain shows up in the intercept. This hints that farmers either plant an extra million acres or take pains to harvest corn for grain if they can.
But the real surprise is soybeans, There is a great deal more variability here. And even more surprising is the observation that on average producers plan to plant seven million more acres than they routinely plant & harvest. Ten percent more!
For what it's worth.
 (corn acres prospective vs harvested-page-001.jpg)
 (soy acres prospective vs harvested-page-001.jpg)
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 corn acres prospective vs harvested-page-001.jpg (97KB - 51 downloads)
soy acres prospective vs harvested-page-001.jpg (85KB - 56 downloads)
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It's that time of year to get obsessed again with ...
