Mark's Market Talk for December 4, 2023

We have flipped the calendar forward another month as we head to the finish of 2023. Most of the harvest has been binned and will probably stay there till after the new year. Local basis levels are telling us that end users are not flush with grain. As we get closer to Christmas these levels may get better as producers may not want to haul during the holidays. Right now, weather is the lead story, both here and in South America. Most of the corn belt is in some type of drought and South America has areas that are too dry or too wet. The export sales numbers released last week were promising for both corn and beans. They are currently running ahead of expectations. With that happening there should not be any downward adjustments in the December report. However, there is some chatter about them raising the corn yield. It seems there have been more good surprises than bad ones. It would be fair to say most areas had better yields than they were expecting. But this was probably due to their expectations being too low due to the extremely dry summer. This past week March corn was 2 cents higher while January beans ended the week 6 cents lower. Most of the bean losses came in the last 2 days of the week. Traders have been reluctant to carry risk through the weekend for the past 3 weeks. The better selling opportunities were early in the week.