U.S. corn starts growing season highly rated

Continuing with last week’s theme of weekly crop updates, we are going to look at the conditions side of that report this week.

As most know, the report "morphs," so to speak, throughout the year to go from showing planting progress in the beginning of the season to showing the condition of the now planted crop throughout the year and then to the harvest progress come fall.

At this point, we are transitioning from planting progress to condition ratings as corn planting has all but wrapped up and soybean planting is approaching the finish line. While condition ratings for the soybean crop will start next week, the newly released condition ratings for the corn crop showed one of the better starts to a season in recent history.

The report breaks conditions down into five categories: very poor, poor, fair, good and excellent.

Last week, the 2024 corn crop received an initial rating of 15% excellent and 60% good for a combined rating of 75%. This was the highest of the last three years, and the sixth highest since 2005. The high reading for that period came in 2018, when the crop started with a 79% good-to-excellent rating. For the 10-year period going back to 2014, the average initial rating has been between 71% and 72%.

Now the question becomes is there any correlation between a high initial crop rating and...