2023 market outlook An early look at new crop balance sheets

By Tom C. Doran AGRINEWS PUBLICATIONS

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Penciling in the possibilities for the 2023-2024 corn and soybean marketing year found an uptick in supplies and slight downturn in prices.

Scott Irwin, University of Illinois ag economist, gave farmdoc’s preliminary look at the next marketing year’s crop balance sheets during the recent Farm Assets Conference.

The first obvious question is where planted acres with the corn-to-soybean price ratio slightly favor corn.

“You might think that total crop acreage is a relatively fixed number — and, in some sense, it is — but there is important variation over time, and I think there is some relationship to prices,” Irwin said.

The total crop base has declined from 330 million acres in the late 1990s to a low of 320 million in 2006.

The ethanol-led boom in corn prices led to an increase in planted in 2013 and 2014 that brought total crop acres up to 330 million.

“With the drop-off in prices after 2014 we basically shrunk back to about 320 million acres. That’s not such a large change off of such a big acre base, but it is an important variable as we look forward,” Irwin said.

“I mistakenly thought that in 2022 we’d see a little bit more of an uptick in total crop acres than we did, given the high profitability. I’m going to go out on a limb and think I was just a year early. We’ll probably see a tick up of another few million acres in total crop acreage in 2023.

“That’s a little bit on the speculative side because of the severe drought in the Great Plains states in Oklahoma,