Mark's Market Talk for December 2, 2024

The markets were somewhat quiet Thanksgiving week as corn was a penny lower while beans finished about 12 higher. We continue to see some large export sales including a couple of bean sales to unknown on Friday that totaled over 36 million bushels. We are ahead of schedule on both corn and bean sales, but our window of opportunity will start slowly closing sometime after the new year starts. Tariff talk continues to grab headlines. It appears Canada and Mexico are willing to talk and hopefully avoid having tariffs levied against them. That would be very good as they are 2 of our largest trading partners and we want to keep the trade gates open to them. China might be a tougher nut to crack. However, they learned during Trump’s first term that he means business. They cannot afford to lose the huge amount of products they ship to the US. But they need to owe up to the fact the United States cannot continue to operate with the kind of trade deficit China currently enjoys. Hopefully we will see some progress on this matter soon after Trump takes office. Congress is still working on a new farm bill. Ag leaders on both sides say they are committed to passing this prior to the new congress taking office. However, it appears there are still some sticking points. Food security is a large part of the farm bill and takes up a large amount of the funding. The question is often raised if this part of the farm bill needs to be split off onto its own bill. Unfortunately, if this happened the actual farm bill would probably get far less attention and funding than it does now. A very small minority of our population works hard to feed this nation and a good share of the world. As long as our citizens have ample food at a decent cost, they really don’t care what the farm bill does for farmers.