By Kirk Maltais
The Agriculture Department reduced its view of how much wheat has been planted this year, and also cut projections for the size of current domestic wheat inventories.
The USDA released its annual Acreage report and its quarterly Grain Stocks report on Tuesday. The first showed total wheat acreage dropping 6% from the prior year, to 42.7 million acres. That's less than what was expected by analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, who forecast planted acreage at 43.8 million acres on average.
In its Grain Stocks report, the USDA said that there are 920 million bushels of old crop wheat in U.S. inventory as of June 1. Surveyed analysts were expecting stocks to land at 935 million acres.
The reductions in both categories comes after a tough year for U.S. winter wheat, which is planted in the prior fall and then harvested during the spring and summer. The latest USDA Crop Progress report published Monday said that only 26% of the U.S. winter crop was in good or excellent condition, down from 48% at this time last year.
The USDA said that farmers planted 95.3 million acres of corn this spring, along with 85.4 million acres of soybeans. Both figures are slightly higher than analyst expectations. Corn stocks totaled 5.29 billion bushels and soybean stocks were 1.06 billion bushels, with corn being less than analyst forecasts and soybeans slightly more.
CBOT grain futures traded higher after the reports were released. Most-active wheat rose 1.9% to $5.91 a bushel, while corn gained 0.5% and soybeans added 0.3%.
Write to Kirk Maltais at kirk.maltais@wsj.com