According to foreign news on March 30, Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) corn futures closed slightly lower on Thursday, as traders adjusted their positions ahead of the key US planting and quarterly inventory reports.
The May corn futures contract settled down 1 cent at $6.49-1/2 a bushel. The new crop December corn futures contract settled down 3-1/2 cents at $5.67 a bushel.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is scheduled to release the planting intentions report and quarterly grain stocks report at 1600 GMT on March 31 (00:00 on April 1, Beijing time). According to the survey of industry analysts, analysts on average expect 90.880 million acres of corn planted in 2023, higher than last year's 88.6 million acres, but slightly lower than the USDA's February outlook forum forecast of 91 million acres. Analysts on average expect U.S. corn stocks to be 7.470 billion bushels in the quarter ended March 1, the lowest for the same period since 2014 and down 3.7% from a year earlier.
The export sales report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday showed that in the week ended March 23, the U.S. corn export sales for the 2022/2023 season increased by 1.0364 million tons, down 67% from the previous week and 34% from the average of the previous four weeks. The previous estimate was a net increase of 600,000-1.8 million tons. This week, the US corn export sales in the next marketing year increased by 21,800 tons, which was previously estimated by the market as a net increase of 50,000 to 300,000 tons.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also announced that private exporters reported export sales of 178,000 tonnes of corn to China for shipment in the 2022/2023 marketing year.
In late CBOT trading, Argentina's Buenos Aires Grain Exchange kept its forecast for the country's corn production unchanged at 36 million tonnes.
