The most widely anticipated crop report of the year will be released at 7:30 a.m., and local traders are already bracing for a wild day.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's August crop report is the grain market's equivalent of the final lap of an Olympic decathlon. It's the first crop report of the year based on actual field reports with tens of thousands of farmers, and will provide the most accurate estimate yet of flood damage.

And this year in particular, given volatile prices for crops the past several months, traders are anxious. Some traders admit that, over the past few weeks, they've been betting more on hearsay and conjecture and less on fundamentals.

"I've never seen this much anticipation for a single crop report," said David Swenson, an associate scientist in the Economics Department at Iowa State University, who has been following the commodities markets since the 1970s.

Many traders project a much stronger corn harvest than forecast due to ideal weather conditions across much of the Midwest. In July, the USDA forecast that U.S. farmers would harvest 11.715 billion bushels of corn. Now, many analysts are projecting a crop of 11.9 billion bushels or more.

The expectation of a stronger crop has already sent the price of corn futures for December delivery down nearly $3 to $5.17 a bushel on Monday from a peak of $7.99 a bushel on June 27. Soybeans have tumbled 14 percent over the last week, the biggest such drop since 1988.

In a normal year, crop conditions start out strong and worsen as summer progresses, as some of the corn and soybeans start to wither from the heat. But this year, things have operated in reverse. As of Monday, 67 percent of the nation's corn crop was in "good or excellent" condition, up from 57 percent in June, according to the USDA.

Michael Swanson, an agricultural economist at Wells Fargo, is projecting a corn harvest of 12.1 billion bushels. "Given the volatility that we've seen this year," he said, "if production is smaller than the whisper numbers, then you could see [the price of corn] charge up 30 cents a bushel. A lot of questions will be answered."

Chris Serres • 612-673-4308