Apr 09 | Closing Market Report

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Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market report. It's the ninth day of April, 2026. It's USDA report day. I'm Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about this morning's release from the United States Department of Agriculture of the World Ag Supply and Demand Estimates. We'll do that with Matt Bennett of AgMarket.net. Then we'll turn our attention as we close out our time together to Mike Tannura at T-Storm Weather to take a look at the forecast across the Midwest, particularly into the Great Plains states—Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas—the hard red winter wheat growing regions. And along the way, we'll discuss chemistry for this season on the farm in the Midwest, corn and soybeans, and waterhemp resistance. Aaron Hager has some thoughts on what producers might try. All on this Thursday edition of the closing market report from Illinois Public Media.

Todd Gleason: Todd Gleason's services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. May corn for the day settled at $4.44, 3 1/4 lower. July at $4.55, down 3. December futures a penny and 3/4 lower at $4.74 1/4. May beans $11.65 1/4, up 3 1/4. July $11.81, 3 higher. And November soybeans a half higher at $11.52 1/2. Bean meal $3.50 higher. Bean oil 28 cents higher. Wheat futures in the soft red July harvest month at $5.85 a bushel, down 6 1/4. And the hard red July at $6.05 3/4, down 6 1/4 cents. Live cattle futures up $1.27 1/2. Feeders $2.42 1/2 higher, and lean hogs down 52 1/2 cents. Crude oil $3.40 lower at $97.74 a barrel. That's in the WTI out west in Texas. And gasoline is a penny and a tenth higher for the day.

02:00 Ag Markets with Matt Bennett

Todd Gleason: Matt Bennett from AgMarket.net now joins us to discuss this morning's USDA World Ag Supply and Demand Estimates report, along with how the trade handled it. Hi, Matt. Thanks for being with us. There weren't really any changes to speak of in the report. What did you think of it?

Matt Bennett: Yeah, it was pretty blasé, pretty typical April report. Most of the time, April doesn't really amount to much. Everybody's looking forward to May when we get the new supply and demand estimates for new crops. So yeah, there just really wasn't anything in that report to kind of hang your hat on. I think some people were hoping, based upon quarterly stocks, that maybe they would have lowered corn carryout a little bit. If you back into some of those numbers, you could make that case, but that's not what they gave us. I think that was viewed as maybe a little bearish considering the trade was expecting a tighter number, but no changes at all today.

Todd Gleason: In the world numbers, were there changes that you paid attention to?

Matt Bennett: Nothing major, but world stocks were a little more—I believe they added about a million tons. Nothing too extravagant, but in essence, what it does is highlight the fact that we're not running out of corn anytime soon. I think that's how the trade is looking at it, that we've got an ample supply and for the time being, until we have a reason to believe otherwise, there's no sense in getting too worried about what the situation is. They know demand is good, but they also know that we've got ample supply.

Todd Gleason: What are you telling producers as they get ready to go to the field?

Matt Bennett: Well, as far as the cash is concerned, this is a time of year when sometimes you can get a nice little push. You want to pay attention to that. There's no question that whenever growers go to the field, typically manpower is a little limited, making it hard to move bushels. So if there's a chance for a basis push, and someone has an opportunity to step in and sell a little corn at a better price than what they have seen lately, there's no doubt that it's something to pay attention to. As far as new crop goes, I'm not super excited about it yet, but if people haven't done anything in this $4.70, $4.75 area, I would challenge them to consider what they would have said about $4.75 back in January. You have to understand whenever we get slightly higher prices, typically we tend to get bullish, and I just think that's not the right way to look at it. I want to look at locking in some worst-case scenarios just in case this thing goes south.

Todd Gleason: Next week on the 14th, USDA's counterpart in Brazil, CONAB, will update its fifth look at the size of that crop. Do you expect them to show anything different for corn or soybeans there?

Matt Bennett: I think there's a growing thought that this corn crop could get just a little bit bigger for safrinha, especially than what the USDA is suggesting. As far as the bean crop, I think everyone knows it's been a pretty good sized crop. They had some harvest issues, but overall it's just a big crop. I really don't expect they're going to see anything major. I do think there's one disparity that we continue to see, and that is that this Argentine crop looks bigger than what the USDA is suggesting. That might be a place where you could see some production adjustments down the road as long as that Argentine crop finishes well.

Todd Gleason: Have you and the AgMarket.net folks talked very much about what China and Brazil have been doing related to trade? There have been some hiccups while Brazil is exporting a phenomenal amount of soybeans to China. There have been times where they have stopped those loads or rejected them. Does that make much of a difference to the world?

Matt Bennett: I think it makes a bit of a difference in the short run. Overall the understanding is there that the beans are there, and that certainly it's going to be tough for US soybeans, as far as exports are concerned, to probably hit that mark. I just don't see it happening when you look at shipments, for instance; we're running around 25 to 30 percent behind a year ago, and USDA is suggesting maybe 15 percent behind a year ago. You have to assume that with Brazil having the available supply they do, while you may have a hiccup here and there, they're still significantly cheaper. I believe China's going to find a way to get those beans bought as long as they can do it reasonably. Bottom line for me, this balance sheet on beans is probably going to loosen up down the road, at least that would be my bet.

Todd Gleason: Hey, thank you much, we appreciate it.

Matt Bennett: Absolutely, Todd, thank you.

Todd Gleason: That's Matt Bennett. He is with AgMarket.net. Up next is one of those stories about farmers understanding far more than you might think. They need to be a mathematician, an engineer, a banker, a financial analyst. They have to understand commodity trade, biology, and chemistry. On that note, weed resistance to soil-applied herbicides is forcing a reevaluation of management strategies this season in the field. University of Illinois weed scientist Aaron Hager detailed this resistance during the annual ALLDAY Ag Outlook Conference in March, suggesting metribuzin remains a viable option to control waterhemp. Here's a portion of his presentation.

06:56 Remember When Authority Controlled Waterhemp? Try Metribuzin

Aaron Hager: Just to give you a brief update, I think a couple of areas of the weed science community are going to play a pretty important part here in 2026. If you remember about three or four years ago, we confirmed that we have what we call Group 15 resistance in waterhemp. Now, if you're not familiar with Group 15 products, that would be things like Dual II Magnum, Zidua, Outlook, and Harness. We actually made that confirmation only on one or two populations that we had identified in Illinois several years ago. When we left off that work, the big question hanging out in front of us was, how common is this? Because we really had no idea. We had it in two populations, but we couldn't assume it was only going to be in two populations.

I brought on a new student in the fall of 2023, and their project was to get a better estimate on how common this would be. For those of you who use those products, primarily in corn, they're in a lot of the premixes that you're using. If anybody in the soybean year is doing this concept of layered residuals, or trying to add a residual herbicide in with your post application, that layered residual will be a Group 15.

How you see this resistance to soil-applied herbicides manifest is that your length of residual control gets less and less. I'll give you a classic example. This year will mark 30 years since I've done my first plot work with waterhemp. Thirty years ago, back in 1996, we had a trial in Bond County, Illinois. We had an experimental compound called F6285 that came into the market as Authority. Authority, at that time, was probably the best soil-applied herbicide that we had ever looked at for waterhemp control in soybeans. It was the closest thing that we ever saw to giving you season-long control of waterhemp, which anymore, is an absurd thing to even mention.

At the rates that we were looking at 30 years ago in Bond County on a sensitive population, we were still getting greater than 90% control at six weeks after planting. Fast forward to about three years ago, we did the exact same trial, at the exact same rates, with the exact same product, in Champaign County. It was a slightly different soil type, but the biggest difference was the Champaign County population was resistant to the PPO chemistry, which is what Authority is. At the same rates that 30 years ago gave us greater than 90% control at six weeks, on this resistant population, we would have had to post that field at three weeks.

That's how this is going to be manifested. In the fall of 2023, we raced around the state and made collections of waterhemp from soybean fields predominantly. What we wanted to do is try to bring these into the greenhouse where we could do what we called a discriminating dose. We can't do the dose-response experiments because those are very time-consuming and large experiments, but that's what we need to confirm resistance. Out of the 127 collections—we hit collections in 84 of Illinois' 102 counties, so we had pretty good distribution around the state—we decided to do a discriminating dose.

We selected a rate of Dual II Magnum that gave us about 45% survival of a known Group 15 resistant population. We picked 45% because we didn't want a rate that was going to be so high that we might exclude populations with a lower level of resistance, but we didn't want it too low that we would advance populations that shouldn't be advanced.

What did we find? Out of the 127 collections, we were able to germinate and use 104. Going into this, I had no preconceived notion of what the frequency would be. Out of the 104, about 42% would be advanced to do a dose response. I was hopeful that number might be closer to 10% or maybe 15% at the most, but it was about 42%. Again, we're not confirming or claiming that we have resistance in 42% of those populations. But if we actually had the time and the resources to do those dose responses, we probably could have come up with that ratio. The reason we bring this to your attention is that's very important chemistry for us in both corn and beans. We have to recognize the fact that if this is as common as what these numbers are suggesting, we can't assume that we're going to get weeks-long residual control like we used to. It's just not going to work for us.

On the good side of things, several years ago we asked the question: why don't we use more metribuzin in Illinois? Anyone remember the old Sencor back in the '70s and '80s? Sencor 75DF. Metribuzin exploits one of the very few weaknesses in the resistance profile of waterhemp. We use two types of triazine herbicides in Illinois and Indiana: symmetrical and asymmetrical. A symmetrical triazine means that the nitrogen atoms in the phenyl ring are symmetrically distributed. A common example of a symmetrical triazine is atrazine, or simazine (Princep). An asymmetrical triazine means those nitrogen atoms are not symmetrically distributed around the ring. The most common example of an asymmetrical triazine is metribuzin.

We have two types of resistance mechanisms to triazines. One is very simply a target site mutation; the target site is changed, and the herbicide can't bind there. When you have target site resistance, symmetrical triazines do not work, nor do asymmetricals. You lose the effectiveness of both. That one weakness I mentioned is the fact that most of our triazine resistance in our Midwestern populations is not target site-based; it's metabolic. They're resistant because they rapidly break it down. When you have metabolic triazine resistance, your asymmetricals do not work, but your symmetricals do—wait, I apologize. Let me correct that based on the science. With metabolic resistance, atrazine is not going to work, but metribuzin still can.

Years ago, we did a little rate titration work. We used Tricor, a 75 DF product from UPL. We put 16 rates of Tricor, starting at 1 ounce of product and went to 16 ounces in 1-ounce increments. Essentially, we found that once you hit 10 ounces of that 75 DF, your control really did not improve. At 10 ounces of Tricor on a population of waterhemp in Champaign County that was resistant to herbicides from six different classes—our worst-case scenario—we saw 92% control at six weeks after planting. That looks a lot like what Authority used to look like.

Our summary is that PPO resistance is limiting the residual activity we can get from many of our soil-applied products in soybean. I think we're missing something with metribuzin; it still can give us an option. Is it going to last the entire season? No. Is it going to control every other species in the field? No. Metribuzin never did before, why do we think it will now? But if Amaranthus is your target species, that might be something to think about. Metribuzin is probably going to be a cheaper option than a lot of these other products in the marketplace right now, and it can work.

Todd Gleason: That was Aaron Hager, Extension Weed Scientist at the University of Illinois. His remarks were recorded during the annual WILLAg.org All Day Ag Outlook Conference held in March.

17:58 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura

Todd Gleason: Let's turn our attention to the growing regions across the planet. Mike Tannura is here. He is the CEO and President at T-Storm Weather. That's in Naperville, Illinois. And T-Storm.net online. Hi, Mike. Thanks for being with us. Let's jump right into this. The hard red winter wheat in Kansas, parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, maybe a little Texas, has had a difficult winter because it's been so very dry, actually much longer than that. It does need rain still. Can you give me an idea whether there's a reprieve coming? I think there is.

Mike Tannura: Well, there is for some of the crop, and the big question regards how much of the crop is going to see these big rains. There are several systems that will move eastward over the next five to ten days, and more than likely even beyond then. Because of that, there's always going to be this low threat for a big rain event for hard red winter wheat in the Plains. But Todd, one of these absolutely has to verify, and here's why. If you look at the proportion of US production that had less than a quarter of its normal rainfall over the last 30 days, for hard red winter wheat, that stands at 56% today. If we go back in our entire record all the way to 2012, there's only one day in April that ever had higher coverage than that, and that was on April 22nd of 2022. This is one of the driest situations we've had there in more than 14 years. This story started back in the middle of March and is still ongoing now. So we need some of these rains to verify.

We think about 30% of the US hard red winter wheat crop will see some pretty decent rains. There's a cold front that will move through over the next 24 hours with some storms. There's another system that moves through tomorrow night and Saturday with more storms. And then after that, several more systems will move by starting as early as Monday and Tuesday. There are certainly many threats for rain, but if you dig into the details, this is where we're a little concerned.

The reason we're going to see these nice rains in the eastern areas is because they're in a fairly low elevation, similar to the Corn Belt—maybe 500 to 1,000 feet. It's pretty easy for nice muggy air to hug the ground when you're that low. As you move into the western Plains, where all of this dryness exists, their elevation is much higher, anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 feet or higher. In order to get high humidities out there to make for big rains, you need to have a slow feed of southerly winds that will transfer muggy air northward. If you don't get that, these systems move across, you get a few storms here and there, but nothing ever turns into a big event. That's why we don't think all of this crop is going to benefit from rain.

Todd Gleason: You mentioned that the eastern areas were going to get more rain. Did you mean the eastern part of the Corn Belt—states east of Kansas? And if so, how much?

Mike Tannura: We were referring to central and eastern areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. That's where that 30% of hard red winter wheat will get nice rains. As you move further east from there, Todd, there's a lot of rain on the way for the Corn Belt. It's a bit uncertain exactly how each of these systems will move by, but there are many systems out there, and it's going to be very warm over the next five to ten days too. You put warm air in front of a bunch of systems, and that's how you get thunderstorms. We'll see a lot of those over the next one to two weeks.

We think corn and soybean planting will eventually turn wet as we move into the middle of the month and certainly once we get about 10 days out. It's not only because we're looking for one to two, maybe even three to four inches of rain, it's because we think that's going to happen over a pretty wide area. When you get a big volume of water developing like that in the central US, that's how you can develop moist conditions pretty quickly. The only thing we would say on the positive side is that a lot of this rain is going to stay to the north of the Mid-South and the far southern Corn Belt until we get into some point next week. That's where planting typically takes place first, and it's taking place right now. So it's not a story of everybody having this problem. On the flip side though, Todd, the Mid-South is in a drought too. That's the same area being affected by some of that dryness we're talking about in the Plains, and while they don't want rain for planting, they do need rain to improve soil moisture.

Todd Gleason: Hey, thank you much. I appreciate it.

Mike Tannura: Yep. Thanks a lot, Todd. Talk to you soon.

Todd Gleason: Mike Tannura is with T-Storm Weather at T-Storm.net online. You may hear him again in the closing market report podcast if you'd like. You can just search that out in your favorite podcast applications or look for it at WILLAg.org. I'm Extension's Todd Gleason. You have a good afternoon.