Mark's Market Talk for September 14, 2026

The USDA released their September WASDE report last Friday. Going into report day, a lot of the discussion centered on where they would put the national corn yield. They came very close to the average trade guess with a yield of 178.5 bushels per acre, down 2.2 bushels from their August number. They used this decrease in production to lower domestic feed use by 150 million bushels. This had been expected for months, but they kept kicking the can down the road. Bottom line, they decreased the carryout by 86 million bushels to 1.567 billion bushels. It takes a sub-1.5 billion bushel carryout to be considered bullish, so we didn’t quite hit that number.

For the week, December corn was down 6 cents. As of Thursday night, the funds were estimated to be long 412,000 corn contracts, down from 431,000 earlier in the week. The bean report was very neutral as they put the average bean yield at 52.8 bushels per acre compared to their August number of 52.7. This was very close to the average trade guess. They raised exports just a touch to counter the increased production and lowered ending stocks by 10 million bushels to 310 million bushels. That is a number that should keep the front-month board price somewhere in the $12s. For the week, beans were down 13 cents and were down 35 cents on Friday following the report. On Thursday, the funds were still record long at 267,000 bean contracts, and that probably got reduced during Friday’s selloff. Next week will tell us if the selloff continues in beans or if the funds defend their long positions and drive the market back up.

Twenty-five years ago last Friday, a terrible tragedy occurred on September 11, 2001. For my generation, it was our Pearl Harbor event to remember. My grandparents talked about Pearl Harbor and told me where they were when it happened. Rhonda and I were in Yellowstone Park on 9/11. There was no cell service, and we stopped at one of the lodges that morning so I could call the office and check on things. When Mary answered the phone, she was crying, and I didn’t know why until she told me something awful had happened in New York City.

Rhonda and I went into a room at the lodge where 30-some people were watching the news reports on TV. I will always remember the complete silence in that room. No one wanted to believe what had happened, and everyone had tears in their eyes. That day will live in infamy for all of us who witnessed it, just like Pearl Harbor did for the generations before us.