The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Fats and Oils Report with statistics related soybean processing will be released on Monday, October 3. Genscape’s outlook for the NASS statistic for August processing is 140.7 million bushels. Genscape’s NASS outlook for July processing was 153.4 million bushels crushed, predicting the NASS statistic with 99.4 percent accuracy.
Genscape monitoring coverage is currently focused on large soybean processors in the Midwest, and includes two plants that are not National Oilseeds Processors Association (NOPA) members. Outages at these two plants totaled about 688,000 bushels missed during August. These outages would not be reflected in the NOPA statistics.
Soybean Processing Outlook
Genscape’s Soybean Processing Monitor outlook directionally agreed with the NOPA statistic released on Thursday September 15, indicating a decrease in the crush rate from July to August 2016. Genscape indicated a 12 percent decline in processing rate in the Indiana-Kentucky-Ohio-Michigan region, which matched NOPA statistics. Additionally, Genscape noted a three percent increase in the processing rate for Iowa, which also matched NOPA statistics. In Illinois, the processing performance in August was similar to the performance in July, while the Minnesota and Southeast regions ticked down.
The NOPA Southwest region registered a 25 percent drop in processing rate from July to August 2016 based on NOPA statistics. Genscape’s tracking of this region indicated that the 7.6 million bushels were missed in the Southwest alone, and based on Genscape analysis, over and above the outages, the baseline processing rate dropped about eight percent.
August Plant Outages
Genscape accounted 15.8 million bushels of missed processing in August. One key example, the Bunge facility in Destrehan, LA, was not processing for 25.7 days out of the 31 days in August. This facility alone translated to 3.4 million missed bushels. The image below at left shows the facility in operation on August 1 and the image at right shows the facility shut down on August 15 with a crane present in the background.
The next NOPA statistical release will be on Monday, October 17, and Genscape’s outlook to clients will be released on Monday, October 10. To provide some broad color on outages over and above scheduled maintenance, Genscape has observed 14 outages in September so far. Some of these were intraday outages while others spanned multiple days, such as an outage at Louis Dreyfus – Claypool, IN that began on September 7, and an outage at Bunge – Council Bluffs, IA that began on September 14.
Genscape’s Soybean Crush Report and new Soybean Crush Outages Monitor provide insight with proprietary, real-time monitoring of a strong statistical sample of the U.S. soybean processing. The crush report is available up to seven days ahead of the NOPA report, and up to three weeks ahead of the NASS report, providing timely, impactful data that assists our clients in making better-informed decisions. The outages monitor provides intraday alerts when plants go offline and summarizes outages and plant statuses in a daily report. To learn more about the services, or to request a copy of the full report for this month, please click here.