Today’s Prices

Grain prices finished mostly higher for the second day in a row.

Grain Market News

Snow Depth

The darker blues in North Dakota where 10-20 inches of snow are on the ground.

This may not be the heart of the US corn and bean belt, but it does display how cold things are in the northern and northwest belt.

Its still early but we need a significant pattern change in this part of the country as we move towards the end of April.

U.S. Radar

Radar shows snow still falling in central and western North Dakota as well as light snow in portions of South Dakota.

Rain, in some cases heavy rain, falling up though the Delta and into the southern Ohio Valley and eastern belt.

This will keep conditions saturated in areas where they would like to be rolling if weather would permit.

7-Day Observed Precipitation

The Guld coast region has gotten some rain, that keeps things relatively slow there.

The Delta into the southern Ohio valley would like to be getting started at this time and they’ve been wet as well.

As we move north into the central US corn and bean belt its extremely wet and much too cold, certainly nothing going on in the far northern belt.

You can see from the 7-day precipitation that central, southern, and southwestern plains continue to be much dryer than desired as well.

Calculated Soil Moisture

The soil is extremely dry in the central and western plains, while there is excessive wetness from portions of the Delta up through the Ohio Valley even portions of the lower Great Lake states

This combo of too wet to the east and too dry too the west is not a favorable environment as we head towards the heart of the US planting season.

7-Day Precipitation Forecast

Unfortunately, the forecast has not changed with cool wet conditions to the north, wet conditions to the central and eastern belt, while dry weather continues a concern in the central and western plains.

We mentioned earlier that the supportive story is that we cannot afford any additional crop problems and yet the US Spring is not getting off to a good start for many farmers.

Weekly Corn Planting Progress

This chart shows what is planted on a week-to-week basis.

Our 13-year average shows that our peak week are the first and second week of May when 18-19% of the crop is planted. So typically, we plant an average of 37% of the crop in the first two weeks of May.

Any time we plant 20% in one week that is a pretty good week, as you can see in 2020, we had 20% planted the last week of April and 24% planted the first week of May. So, we had a good start to the planting season.

Last year we got off to a relatively slow start, we didn’t plant much in April just a couple of percent by the last week but then we planted 29% the first week of May and 21% the second week of May.

Last year we planted 50% of the US corn crop in the first 2 weeks of May.

This year as for the second week of April the US is 2% planted, therefore we need to see a significant change in the weather pattern to accelerate planting. Unfortunately, that pattern doesn’t look to change at least not in the next week.

Grain Market News

World Vegetable Oil Prices

Rotterdam Oil has pushed to a new high and the US soybean oil is one of the cheaper sources of edible oil in the world at this time.

The only source cheaper is Malaysian palm oil which is slightly cheaper.

Last year in both the Spring and into the Summer there were many sources of global oil seeds that were cheaper than the US, that allowed some switching to take place from US prices rallying last Spring.

US prices even though they are relatively high are amongst some of the cheapest in the world, that is again another one of our supportive underlying fundamental features.

Weekly Ethanol Production

Production was down fractionally from last week at 995 thousand barrels per day, but this isn’t unusual.

If you look at our lines, many of the years previously, we’ve seen a reduction in the late March through early May timeframe when many plants are taking some Spring downtime.

We do suspect that as we move towards May and June-July that our ethanol production will increase seasonally, and we are on track to reach USDA current corn use estimate.

Our year-to-date ethanol production is up 9.7% from a year ago, USDA is estimating that corn use will be up 6.8%.

Weekly Stocks of Fuel Ethanol

Stocks of fuel ethanol has dropped for the second week in a row, this week was a sharp drop to 24.8 million barrels.

There is two pieces of good news, one is we do decline seasonally in the April-June timeframe, and we are declining now, secondly US ethanol has become very competitive on the global market.

We are now 60-70 cents per gallon below Brazilian ethanol and ethanol is 60-70 cents below the price of gasoline. Therefore, we expect stocks of fuel ethanol to continue to trend lower as we move through the Spring into early Summer.

March Corn Chart

Corn prices made another new high today up to 7.79.

All the trends are pointed upward, the only item that is giving some pause is that technical indicators are extremely overbought.

March Soybean Chart

Soybean prices consolidating now for about the 4th day in a row.

We have overhead resistance from the downtrend line and chat support at our long term uptrend.

March KC Wheat Chart

Wheat prices look a lot like corn the only difference is wheat has not posted new highs.

It has moved to a new high for this move up to 11.84.

That keeps the trend pointed upward, technical upward, and now entering the over bought range.

Questions or Comments

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