Good Morning!
I hope all is well around your operation. We continue to wait and see if we get a rain. I know many of you are in drought-like conditions to finish the growing season, so again I hate to complain. In all honesty, I feel good about our production overall, especially the early-planted corn and beans. Where we had to replant later in May, we need rain soon or we could have a dynamic I haven’t seen many times in my career. We could see record yields on our April-planted corn and collect crop insurance on the May-planted IF we see hot and dry conditions stick around. Now, we’re supposed to get a respite on temperatures next week, but our chances for rain are somewhere between slim and none at the present time. It seems when we get this dry late in the summer that the only thing that will break us out of this is a tropical storm or hurricane…and some of the Ohio River Valley looks to benefit from Laura, but most of us will be too far north. Keep us posted on how things look for you around your operation. We appreciate the feedback. matt@agmarket.net
The corn market was dead on Wednesday, trading back towards unchanged after a day in the red. The bean market, on the other hand, traded higher for much of the session and settled towards the upper end of the range. With a big export sales announcement of 400k mt of beans to China, we continue to see strong demand even as beans have rallied sharply. At the same time, both the corn and bean crops appear to be shrinking by the day. While most of the talk seems to center around how much we’ve lost for 2020 production, demand remains strong. Outside markets should were likely positive as October crude oil settled up four cents at $43.39. This was 39 cents off both the high and low of the day. The DOW was up 119 points at 28,312. The Dollar was getting beat up, settling down .119 at 92.905.
Corn – The corn market was quite boring in the end, but I’ll take the way corn closed versus how it traded for much of the day. September corn closed a quarter of a penny lower at $3.40 ½. This was three-quarters of a penny off the high and 3 ¼ cents off the low of the day. The EIA report from the Department of Energy showed corn usage for ethanol up a bit from a week ago at around 93.5 million bushels of corn usage. The corn market really struggled on the overnight and during the early part of the day session before beans seemed to drag them back closer to unchanged. While usage remains strong, exports haven’t been as often an occurrence as they have for the bean market. With plenty of the corn ‘made’ the market is trying to gauge just how bad it might be for the later planted corn given how dry much of the corn-belt has become. I am going to have the last bushels from 2019 sold by the end of the week. I’m not bearish but we’re certainly running out of time…and have been blessed by this nice rally heading into harvest.
Soybeans – Soybeans performed better than corn on Wednesday, posting gains throughout the session. November beans settled up 4 cents at $9.24 ¼. The close was a penny and a half off the high and 4 ¾ cents off the low of the day. The bean market continues to march higher, which isn’t always a given in the month of August. With it becoming more surprising if we don’t see export sales every morning, the strong demand for this bean market continues to support. Not to be ignored is the hotter, drier weather much of the Midwest continues to struggle with. This week is the hottest we’ve been in some time, which makes it really tough for producers who haven’t seen a rain in a good while. The bean crop has the makings of an enormous one, but if we don’t get the rain, it’s going to be tough to see this crop much over a 50 bu/ac yield. I’m not necessarily bullish, but I will say I’m going to re-own most of my beans this year…maybe all of them. If you want help with your strategy, please get ahold of us at your convenience.
Call us if you want to talk positions or strategy…or simply bend our ear. If you want more information on the markets, be sure to visit my team’s website at https://www.agmarket.net/
Matt Bennett
217-273-1133 – Work
@chief321 – Twitter
matt@bennettconsulting.net – E-mail
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