Mark's Market Talk for January 19, 2025

Jan 19, 2026


By now, everyone has seen or heard the results of last Monday’s WASDE report. If you had predicted what the government was going to release on the corn side and traded ahead of it, you would be very wealthy. I don’t think anyone saw this coming.

The average trade guess was a 2-bushel reduction in corn yield, yet they raised it by a half bushel. They also increased harvested acres by 1.3 million due to fewer acres being chopped for silage. Combined, those changes pushed total production above 17 billion bushels and put carryout near 2.2 billion bushels.

The market reacted accordingly, dropping 24 cents on Monday and then struggling to stay even for the rest of the week. Corn ended the week 21 cents lower, which given all the bad news was actually better than expected.

So where do we go from here? Arguing that the numbers are wrong does no good. They are what fund traders have to work with until the next report. It appears we may need to lower price expectations by 25 to 30 cents. That doesn’t fit well into an already stretched cash flow, and if you are using borrowed money to hold grain, interest costs can weigh heavily on your final net price.

The report was less of a problem for beans but still bearish. Yield was left unchanged at 53 bushels, but exports were lowered and 200,000 acres were added. That pushed carryout up 60 million bushels to 350 million. This is not a bullish number. The export figure will likely need to be reduced further, and Brazil has begun harvesting what is expected to be a record soybean crop.

Funds were heavy sellers of both corn and bean contracts following the report. They sold 65,000 corn contracts and now sit short 82,000. They sold 45,000 bean contracts, reducing their long position to just 13,000.

It’s disappointing that a single report can trigger such a negative response, something we’ve seen before. But when you live in a free market, you have to take the bad with the good. If input prices had come down accordingly, it might work, but that has not happened at all.