We have added U.S. cotton crop condition updates to our regular weekly Crop Progress post. This post contains a summary of the newly-added graphics. Moving forward, please make sure you have Cotton Fundamentals selected in your personal “Blog Subscriptions” settings in order to be notified of updates.
For those familiar with our crop condition updates for corn, soybeans and wheat, we include a graphic of the RJO Market Insights Crop Condition Index. For this chart, we use the USDA’s crop condition breakdown (excellent, good, fair, poor, very poor) and apply a weighting formula in order to produce a single “condition score.” This number allows for an “apples to apples” comparison of crop conditions to past years rather than a simple combined good/excellent rating, which can be misleading depending on the individual scores for each. Using this week’s update as a reference, it can quickly be assessed that this year’s current conditions are better than the last two years in early June, while being slightly below average conditions at this time of the year over the last 5- and 10-year periods.
The attached PDF file to this post will also be included in our regular Crop Progress posts moving forward, as well, providing a historical perspective of crop conditions changes over the course of the growing season in recent years, along with a reference of final U.S. average yields in those years.
