Mark's Market Talk

The USDA released their March WADSE report last week and as expected it did not contain any big surprises. They lowered the carryout a little for both corn and beans and were right in the target zone of the traders. Thursday’s export sales report was very friendly and gave us some support. South America is having trouble getting the crop to the ports and loaded onto ships. Nothing is moving out of Ukraine at this point so if someone wanted corn or beans right away the US is the place to come. Bear spreading was obvious in both corn and beans. For the week May corn gained 8 cents while Dec was 25 cents higher. May beans ended 15 cents higher on the week while Nov beans were 40 cents higher. Old crop prices had advanced a lot faster than new crop, so it appears the trade has started the process of evening this out. It is doubtful the spread will come together by just raising the new crop values unless the war continues, and we start to see weather issues develop in our country. The current large inverse in the markets have the foreign buyers looking to buy new crop if they have enough supply to hold out. Not all of them will be able to so we should continue to see some old crop movement. Domestic end users are bought up near term but will need summer bushels to make it to fall. Bean processors and ethanol plants are both running in the black and are pushing their plants to run full speed plus. The funds will work on positioning their selves ahead of the planting intentions report later this month. We may not be able to say this a first time that all crops we raise in this country are at the upper end of their pricing, but it may be close. There will be a lot of areas where they can jump from one crop to another and cause some disruption in the number of acres planted to certain crops. Corn, beans, wheat, sorghum, cotton are all at profitable levels right now. It could be one of the biggest USDA reports in a long time. I think we have heard that a lot recently.