May wheat was near unchanged late in the overnight session. Outside market forces look mixed. The USDA data yesterday was negative for the wheat market but with a 70 cent surge in corn values, traders see better demand for wheat as a feed short-term and this has helped support. Given the outlook for increasing world and US ending stocks with normal weather, it appears the market will need to see weather issues developing for key world crops or else buying support might diminish. For now, it looks like the plains saw a bit more rain than expected over the past few days but conditions might deteriorate ahead with a hotter and drier short-term outlook. Uncertainties with the China crop and dry weather in Europe may also help provide some support but Black Sea region weather appears good. May wheat closed sharply higher on the session yesterday and pushed to the highest level since March 9th. Higher than expected plantings for the spring wheat crop plus higher than expected March 1st stocks was offset by fund buying in grains. Traders were looking for spring wheat plantings to come in near 13.7 million acres, near unchanged from last year but the USDA came in at 14.4 million acres. Total wheat plantings are expected at 58.0 million acres as compared with trade expectations at 57.2 million, up from 53.6 million last year. March 1st wheat stocks came in at 1.425 billion bushels which was about 25 million bushels above expectations. Weekly export sales for wheat came in at 271,500 metric tonnes for the current marketing year and 138,000 for the next marketing year for a total of 409,500. Sales of 134,000 metric tonnes are needed each week to reach the USDA forecast. Jordon bought 50,000 tonnes of wheat at their tender for 100,000 tonnes. The EU granted export licenses for 480,000 tonnes of soft wheat this week which pushed cumulative total so far this season to 15.4 million tonnes as compared with 13.4 million last year at this point. Pest and disease problems were noted for the China crop with some rain possible for today but a mostly dry forecast for the next week. Traders also see a lack of rain for the southwestern plains of the US in the forecast as supportive and see potential difficulty getting the US spring wheat and Canadian prairies crops planted on time this spring due to heavy snow cover and cool/wet weather recently. Talk of temperatures into the 90’s in the southwestern plains for this weekend also helped support new crop wheat.