WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. farmers planted slightly more corn and 3 percent more soybeans than they had initially planned, the government said Friday, but drought in the heartland jeopardized the harvest in a year when bumper crops are needed.

The Agriculture Department said growers planted the largest amount of corn in 75 years, and the third-largest amount of soybeans on record. The plantings were slightly larger than traders had expected.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – American farmers likely sowed far more soybean seeds than they had originally intended this year and planted the most corn acreage in 75 years, the U.S. government is expected to say on Friday in a report that has been overshadowed by a deepening drought in the Midwest.

The U.S. Agriculture Department’s acreage and quarterly stockpile reports, normally among the most important of the year for estimating supplies from the world’s top grower, may be set aside by traders who fear that intense heat and a lack of rain is damaging corn stalks every day. Those conditions also may have dissuaded some farmers from planting soybeans on recently harvested wheat fields.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Senate approved sweeping new U.S. farm legislation on Thursday that would cut almost all traditional farm subsidies while expanding a costly crop insurance program, but odds are slim the bill will pass this year.

Passed by an 2-1 margin, the Senate’s $498 billion five-year farm bill would compensate growers when revenue from a crop falls, rather than prop up prices.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With Congress on the brink of passing the most sweeping farm spending cuts in a generation, critics are riled the budget axe will spare billions of dollars in federal subsidies for private companies that reap double-digit returns for insuring crops.

Two years of wrangling over the next farm bill has cut $23 billion over the coming decades from crop subsidies, conservation programs, food stamps and a range of rural economic development programs.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With the U.S. Congress on the brink of passing the most sweeping farm spending cuts in a generation, critics are riled the budget axe will spare billions of dollars in federal subsidies for private companies that reap double-digit returns for insuring crops.

Two years of wrangling over the next farm bill has cut $23 billion over the coming decades from crop subsidies, conservation programs, food stamps and a range of rural economic development programs.

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) – Two U.S. House Appropriations
panels on Wednesday took aim at the budgets of the country’s
leading financial market regulators, voting to slash spending
for one agency and only marginally boost funding for the other.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission would get a 12
percent budget cut for fiscal 2013, from $205 million to $180.4
million in an agriculture funding bill approved by one House
Appropriations subcommittee.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – From Ohio to Kansas, corn is selling at startlingly high prices, so high that they are signaling the United States will run short of corn this summer.

If it does run short, the impact could be felt worldwide. Sales to big export customers like Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and China could take a hit as America grows 40 percent of the corn sold on the world market.

CHICAGO/WASHINGTON, May 24 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department
of Agriculture is considering pushing back the release time for
its market-sensitive crop reports to mid- or late-morning,
during the height of Chicago trade to possibly minimize market
volatility, according to an industry official who met with the
agency on Thursday.

As the USDA considers whether to adjust its reporting
schedule after the CME launched nearly round-the-clock trade
this week, USDA Chief Economist Joe Glauber told representatives
of major U.S. agricultural trade groups on Thursday that the
agency would soon open a 30-day comment period to seek public
opinion on such an adjustment.

WASHINGTON, May 10 (Reuters) – A record U.S. corn crop this
fall will end two years of nail-biting tight supplies, the
government predicted on Thursday, while its forecasts for
lower-than-expected global stocks of wheat and soybeans may keep
food prices high.

The U.S. Agriculture Department’s first estimates for this
year’s harvest and next year’s demand showed that domestic corn
stocks will surge from a near record low this year to a
seven-year high by September 2013, aided by expected record
yields this year as farmers sprinted to plant an early crop.

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO, May 10 (Reuters) – Global stockpiles of
corn and soybeans are set to rise next autumn after years of
thinning inventories, the U.S. Agriculture Department was
expected to say on Thursday, offering hope for a break in the
cycle of surging food prices.

A breakneck start on planting the U.S. corn crop and timely
rains in the drought-hit wheat fields of the southern Plains may
encourage the USDA to estimate higher-than-average yields,
analysts said ahead of the first USDA report to project crops
and ending stockpiles for the 2012/13 crop year.