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1. Here is my best effort to understand the USDA corn planted acreage number. Corn and soybean planted acreage combined went down 11.6 million acres yoy. PP increased 14.4 million acres yoy. Total of planted and PP for the two crops increased 2.8 million acres yoy. 
2. So, corn and soybeans acreage pie increased by 3 million acres in 2019. That sounds plausible. Would like to know where those 3 million acres came from?
3. In this sense, the planted and PP acres for corn from the USDA add up. I still think planted and harvested corn acres will be lower in the final January report. Maybe 1-2 million lower given yoy increase in total below. But have to assume these are close.
4. So, basically what happened is that corn planted acres dropped marginally after March, corn PP acres increased dramatically, and the corn PP acres were taken out of soybean planted acres. What I missed was farmers desire to keep corn acres flat AND huge increase in corn PP.
5. Why I missed the mark so badly on corn planted acres then comes down to farmers planting decisions in June. I am still shocked that 38-40 million acres of corn apparently got planted in June. I expected that number to be at least 5 mil lower due to June planting dates.
6. So the real question I have now is what motivated all those 38-40 million acres of corn getting planted in June? In other words, why wasn't corn PP even bigger than the record 11.2 million acres reported today by the USDA?
7. Illinois is a perfect case study in this regard. IL corn planted acreage according to USDA is 10.7 million acres, only down 300k from 2018. IL corn planting progress on May 26 was only 35%. Implies that IL farmers planted 7 mil ac of corn after May 26, most of it in June.
8. FSA data indicate that IL corn PP was 1.1 million acres this year. Honestly, given so little planting progress before June in IL, I expected corn PP to be around twice what is turned out to be. So why'd ya do it IL farmers?
9. One factor that seems to line up with keeping the corn planters running well into June was the May 31 announcement of the MFP2 payment program. When released it @SecretarySonny said you had to plant something to get the payment. This coupling may have been key.
@SecretarySonny 10. We will never know for sure, but, ironically enough, the timing of the release of the MFP2 payment program, with its coupling to planting something, may have actually sealed the doom of the corn market this year.
