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Analyst: China’s incremental soybean buys have kept pressure off of infrastructure

A grain analyst says China is just under 50 percent of its agreement to buy soybeans as sales have continued to trickle in the past few weeks.

Angie Setzer with Consus Ag Consulting tells Brownfield, “There’s a lot more, in the way of business, being done behind the scenes.”

“Still, we’re not going to see them meet this end-of-the-year deadline,” she says. “I think that was more of a miscommunication on the part of the Treasury Secretary, not understanding marketing years more than anything, that gave us this sort of false sense of when the business was going to be done.”

Secretary Bessent earlier in the week said China was on pace to meet its 12 million ton commitment by the end of February.

Setzer says the flow of purchases isn’t a bad thing because the U.S. rail system couldn’t handle the added pressure.

“We have such a massive corn program, for one, to the rest of the world, and we have a lot of beans that we’ve already committed to the rest of the world,” she explains. “We have our space, our ability to kind of get bushels moved from where they are to where they need to be, maxed out here through the end of January.”

Setzer says she’s watching China’s appetite for feed grain imports like sorghum and corn.

“China’s corn prices overnight hit a new contract high for the January contract,” she points out. “They settled slightly off it as they went into the weekend, but if you look at stocks available both in northern and southern ports, they’re well below the five-year average.”

On Mondays, the USDA includes sales that have been shipped in the Weekly Export Inspections Report.