Mark's Market Talk for February 5th, 2024

Another week and another week lower. For beans this is the 7^th week in a row that they have closed lower. You start thinking we should be reaching a low, but our beans are still overpriced on the world market. Brazil has few storage options so once harvest begins the beans must start leaving the country. That means they are willing to drop the price as much as they need to keep the export channel going. Beans ended last week 21 cents lower. We had a nice one-day rally early in the week, but there was no follow through so the road turned south for the rest of the week. Meal did find a little support and closed higher for the week. Meal took us on the last ride up, can it do it again? Corn was 4 cents lower last week on ho hum news. The Safrina crop is going in the ground and so far, it is going smoothly. Ethanol production recovered from the cold snap, but crude oil has trended lower which does not support the corn market. A year ago, on January 31^st the local corn market was 6.63, this year it was 4.17 a 2.46 dollar difference. Beans a year ago were 15.07, this year they were 11.76. That is a difference of 3.31. This is a perfect example of the saying that the cure for high prices is high prices.