Let it not be said the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) doesn’t continue to surprise us. The trade went into the report with a slightly positive bias for wheat, neutral for corn and a little negative for soybeans. They were somewhat wrong on all counts, albeit none of the numbers were a huge shock.

The winter wheat planting number may have been the biggest surprise. The 32.6-million-acre plantings were 1.5 million higher than expected. Still, they represented an...