Mark's Market Talk

The grain price charts have looked really ragged lately. This past week December corn closed 35 cents higher. The week before it closed 66 cents lower. That is a 1.01 spread and if you looked at the actual high and low prices for the 2-week period it might have been 1.50. Beans were wilder yet. This past week November beans closed 62 cents higher. The week before they were 72 cents lower which equals a 1.34 cent spread. We have had many years in the past when we did not see price fluctuations like this during the entire year. Right now, it looks like this may continue for a while. The July stocks report last week was a non-mover as things stayed the same. The USDA has chosen not to adjust yields yet, so the tables had minimal change. Corn will soon be past the weather stage as expected yields become more predictable. However, at this point we do not have a good handle on a lot of acres that have been affected by the lack of rain. The current forecast keeps the western and northern plains in the hot/dry pattern. So, it is still too early to say we will have trend line corn yields. A shift of 2 bushels either way could prompt a dollar move in new crop pricing. Beans have more time to set yield although the thought is the northern plains have areas that are about done for. They came into this year very dry, and they have missed most of the rain so we may lose 2 to 4 million acres of beans to drought. Maybe a safer way to say this is that we will lose bushels in these areas. Today’s genetics can pull off some incredible things, but if it is as bad as they say in North Dakota, the losses will be real. Mean while most of our trade area is looking at the possibility of near record yields, especially corn. Beans appear to be more variable as we have areas that have actually had too much rain. Beans in the southern 2 tiers of counties are going backward. They need warm/dry weather to help them. It is rare this area ever turns down rain in mid-July but this year they would.