Traders will have varied widely in their approaches to analyzing and reacting to today’s crop reports. Access to data feeds from the USDA allows some market participants to quickly extract key estimates from the reports, which can be plugged into trading algorithms if desired. Newswire services similarly scrub the reports to compile the headlines and summarize the results. These media agencies used to be allowed inside USDA offices in Washington D.C. to prepare for instant news releases. That was the way I held the August 2014 report in my hands about 30 minutes before it was released to the public, but the government eliminated the ‘lockup’ access in 2018. Many people are in between needing an instant feed to the data and wanting to wait on somebody else’s analysis, so they go straight to the crop report itself. Here was my process for getting through report day: The national yield and acreage estimates come from the Crop Production report over to the WASDE balance sheets, so the WASDE report is usually brought up first. For me it was an immediate scroll down to the corn balance sheet, but on the way you can catch that the U.S. wheat ending…