Mark's Market Talk for April 15, 2025

Sometimes it seems you must throw all the bad news you can find at something in order to get a positive response. That’s how the grain markets reacted last week to all the tariff talk. At the end of the week May corn was up 30 cents and Dec corn went up 17. Beans fared even better as May beans were 66 cents higher, and the Nov contract was 41 higher. At the same time some are predicting more corn acres will get planted than the government predicted at the end of March. Anhydrous supplies are running tight and normally the season would be done by now. However, areas that raise top corn yields are seeing a lot of cornstalks getting anhydrous applied. The quarterly stocks report that came out last Thursday was positive for corn and a little better than neutral for beans. They raised corn exports 100 million and reduced the feed 25 million to take another 75 million off the carryout, putting it at 1.465 billion bushels. This should help keep a solid base under old crop corn through pollination. They took the bean carryout down 5 million bushels to 375. This is not a bullish number, but better than the 500 million bushels we once thought we would be looking at. If bean acres decrease further this spring as more corn is planted, we may be able to chip away at this number some more. A lot will hinge on where we end up with the tariff disputes. Today it appears most of the world is willing to meet with our administration and work out our differences. That was the reason for the 90-day reprieve for just about everyone except China. We can argue for days about who is more impacted, The US or China, but it looks like both countries have things to lose here. However, we need to correct the huge trade imbalance that we have allowed to build and get these trade issues settled.