With the government slowly reopening, the weekly government reports — including the export sales — are covering the data that was missed during the shutdown. Allendale commodity broker Greg McBride said it will take a while for the government to catch up with.

“Yeah, we’re going to be playing catch up for for a little while here. This will take us until about Christmas to get caught up on on these export numbers, just the same way as the commitment of traders reports from the CFTC will take us until about the end of January to get caught up.”

 This report covers the data from September 26 to October 2. McBride said the corn sales were some of the best for that timeframe.

“Here’s what we got today. The timeframe was from September 26 through October 2. We got corn sales of 2.25 million tons, soybean sales of 919,000 tons, and a big number for wheat at 888,000 tons. Overall, we’re looking at these numbers for corn, which are the third-best for that particular week we’ve ever had. This continues the good trend of sales for corn.”

 McBride said the soybean numbers weren’t as good, but they were still acceptable.

“These were okay. They weren’t phenomenal, but they do represent that they’re just fine. I guess that’s the best way to put it. We’re still behind where we need to be, but we know that Chinese demand has taken place. That won’t be reflected in this report, but we should start to see it here, hopefully, and not just in the future.”

 McBride added that China made a purchase of over one million tons of soybeans, which is a start to their apparent commitment to purchase 12 million tons by the end of the year.