Episode Number
10420
Episode Show Notes / Description
The Pro Farmer national yield predictions released today present a sharply mixed outlook for this year's harvest, diverging significantly from recent USDA estimates. Pro Farmer pegs the national corn yield at just 173.2 bushels to the acre—down sharply from the USDA’s 180.7 estimate—driven primarily by lower ear counts and persistent nutrient loss across the rain-soaked eastern corn belt. Conversely, they project a record-breaking soybean crop at 53.3 bushels to the acre, supported by impressive pod counts and sufficient moisture to finish the crop out strong. Market analysts anticipate this divergence will prompt a bullish reaction in corn and pressure soybean prices, particularly as the trade looks ahead to critical late-September trade negotiations between the US and China. In the livestock sector, a newly announced plan to import 300,000 metric tons of African beef is expected to heavily pressure domestic cattle prices heading into the fall. Fortunately for Midwest row crops, the weather pattern is finally shifting toward a drier, sunnier trend that will provide the essential growing degree days needed to finish the season.
00:40 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch.com
07:29 Pro Farmer 173.2 Corn / 53.3 Soybean
12:41 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
00:40 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch.com
07:29 Pro Farmer 173.2 Corn / 53.3 Soybean
12:41 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
Transcript
cmr260821
The Pro Farmer national yield predictions released today present a sharply mixed outlook for this year's harvest, diverging significantly from recent USDA estimates. Pro Farmer pegs the national corn yield at just 173.2 bushels to the acre—down sharply from the USDA’s 180.7 estimate—driven primarily by lower ear counts and persistent nutrient loss across the rain-soaked eastern corn belt. Conversely, they project a record-breaking soybean crop at 53.3 bushels to the acre, supported by impressive pod counts and sufficient moisture to finish the crop out strong. Market analysts anticipate this divergence will prompt a bullish reaction in corn and pressure soybean prices, particularly as the trade looks ahead to critical late-September trade negotiations between the US and China. In the livestock sector, a newly announced plan to import 300,000 metric tons of African beef is expected to heavily pressure domestic cattle prices heading into the fall. Fortunately for Midwest row crops, the weather pattern is finally shifting toward a drier, sunnier trend that will provide the essential growing degree days needed to finish the season.
00:40 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch.com
07:29 Pro Farmer 173.2 Corn / 53.3 Soybean
12:41 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
---
Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 21st day of August, and we have a big day in front of us. Pro Farmer has released their national yield predictions. They put this year’s corn crop at 173.2 bushels to the acre. That is down sharply from the August estimate from USDA at 180.7. They put the soybean crop at a bigger crop, at 53.3 bushels to the acre. We will talk about that all in just a moment right here on the Closing Market Report.
00:40 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch.com
Todd Gleason: Mike Zuzolo of GlobalCommResearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, now joins us to talk about what has happened in Chicago for the week. Mike, the news is not the crop tour that took place, but the national numbers from Pro Farmer released at 1:30 today. They put the national yield for corn at 173.2 bushels to the acre, with a 15.344 billion bushel corn crop. That is way off where USDA had been in the August numbers. However, they were well above the soybean number, right at the trendline of 53.3, which USDA backed off of, and a 4.572 billion bushel soybean crop. If realized, that size soybean crop would be the largest ever harvested in the United States. They did use the acreage that USDA had in August as a reference. What is your reaction?
Mike Zuzolo: Todd, a week ago you and I talked about the tour and being concerned about big pod counts for soybeans, and that the trade was holding back on soybean potential upside even with Chinese buying because of this potential in the tour. That seems to have occurred with the 53.3 yield. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but I heard the pod counts were down all week long, so the 53.3 yield does surprise me some. What surprises me the most is being relatively higher on the yield when looking at the range of soybeans they came out with versus USDA, and not coming close to the yield number in corn. You could explain it through the idea that the grain fill and the tip back are going to bring the yields down in the corn, but that is probably a bridge too far for me right now to go from the 180.7 USDA number to 173.2 Pro Farmer. In the context of the problems we have seen in the eastern corn belt and bean belt, unless they see something indicating the extreme heavy rains would have hurt the corn more than the beans—which agronomically does not make sense—it is a tough one for me coming off a week where it has probably been the most bullish, price-friendly crop tour I can remember since 2012. With the beans not wanting to rally as much as the corn, we will close up about 6.5% to 7% in corn, and soybeans up about 4.2%. Part of this goes back to what has been happening in the Black Sea and Paris. Paris corn is at a three-and-a-half-year high regarding the cash price. The Paris futures hit 840 this week, a three-and-a-half-year high. My take is you can have one but not the other; one is too high or one is too low.
Todd Gleason: We can move on from that. We will see how the trade reacts on Sunday night to these numbers. It will be interesting to watch and see how that happens. It may be a quick reaction to USDA and then they get back to what they believe the marketplace might be.
Mike Zuzolo: To dovetail with that, they go through seven of the most important states in the corn belt production-wise. That is a fair assessment, but there are 18 states that USDA measures, and that will be the issue. This opens the door to buying more corn and selling more beans, especially if you do not have the Chinese trade relationship sitting in a good spot like it is right now. This is a big “if” because this weekend we will have an economic D-Day, as the Trump administration calls it, with Iran. China has been unequivocal in saying not to go too far with this because they will respond.
Todd Gleason: They have said they are not going to participate.
Mike Zuzolo: Exactly. This is the layover from what we talked about last week. It is continuing. We just do not know where the US and China are heading into the mid-to-late September meeting and state visit by President Xi.
Todd Gleason: The next important step is the USDA numbers in September, but really everyone will be waiting for that meeting at the end of September between President Xi and President Trump, and what, if anything, comes out of that deal.
Mike Zuzolo: Yes, I agree.
Todd Gleason: That will be about the time producers go to the field. Their marketing will be done at that point. It will be interesting to watch.
Mike Zuzolo: This is where the pod fill comes into place. Are we going to stay cool and disease-free these next 20 days for soybeans? Is it going to make the Pro Farmer number look right, or will it be very high because it matches up more with the corn? I take issue with the number of ears issue based upon my own survey with clients. They are talking about 12 to 14 around, not 16 to 18 around in central and southern Illinois this year. They are not talking about issues with the number of ears on the plants.
Todd Gleason: Beef cattle, what is on the line?
Mike Zuzolo: This comes in the context of the Trump administration announcing Friday taking on 300,000 metric tons of African beef that will be at 25% below current market prices. It is with the idea that they will try and pull prices down during this last grilling season ahead of the election. It is resoundingly coming across Friday from my cattlemen and cattlewomen clients that they are not going to retain, and this will be a really big hit to the marketplace if cattle prices stay weak. The Cattle on Feed report Friday is a super important number of head on feed. I am hoping President Trump redirects and reverses this course before the end of the weekend because it will create a tighter cattle supply domestically, and we will rely more upon imports in the foreseeable future.
Todd Gleason: Thank you much, Mike. Mike Zuzolo is at GlobalCommResearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, and joined us on this Friday edition of the Closing Market Report. Find it online, listen again at willag.org.
07:29 Pro Farmer 173.2 Corn / 53.3 Soybean
Todd Gleason: We are now joined by Pro Farmer economist Lane Akre. He is traveling back to his home after being on the road all week with the tour and has an update with the Pro Farmer national yields. These are not the tour yields, but the national yields. Lane, thank you for being with us. What did you find?
Lane Akre: Thanks for having me. The eastern part of the corn belt has struggled a lot, and we have seen lower ear counts and smaller ears than a year ago. That pulled down what we expect out of this crop. On the corn side, we ended up with an average yield of 173.2 bushels to the acre. We have a 1% band on either side of that, from 175 down to 171.5. We reviewed the FSA planted acreage estimates that NASS used in that latest crop production report. We do not feel strongly that the number is going to shift one way or the other. There might be a slight downtick in harvested acreage, but we are not going to try to put a pin on that number, so we are using USDA’s harvested acre figure. We have a national production of 15.344 billion bushels. On the soybean side, we found some pretty impressive beans. The moisture is there to help the crop finish out, and we are anticipating a record soybean yield this year, topping last year’s record. We anticipate the national average yield at 53.3 bushels to the acre. We use a 2% band on soybeans, up to 54.4 bushels down to 52.2. Again, we are using USDA’s harvested acres there, production of 4.572 billion bushels, which would be a record. The pods are impressive. What we found in Iowa and Illinois showed that, while we only found one state that had more pods versus a year ago—which was Minnesota with a very impressive soybean and corn crop—we think the moisture the crop has and the way it will finish could propel that yield to a record.
Todd Gleason: Repeat to me what your number was for corn.
Lane Akre: 173.2.
Todd Gleason: How did you get to that number? USDA was at 180.7 in August. What was it that was in the crop scout reports that drove the number lower?
Lane Akre: It was a combination of those lower ear counts, especially in the eastern part of the corn belt. Typically, when you have those lower ear counts, you are going to see bigger ears. The crop has got more nutrients and sunlight, and is able to throw on a bigger ear. But the weather challenges that the corn belt in general has faced just did not allow for that to happen. We saw a very big discrepancy between where USDA had the crop in that August report—which was survey-based and using NDVI data, and incorporating the crop progress report—and what was found in the field. There is no objective yield data in that August report from USDA. Using our historical spread between where the tour all-sample averages are for the state and the USDA final, we were 20 bushels away in Indiana and Illinois. When you see a 20-bushel drop in those two states, that national yield number is going to fall, and that helped push our national average yield down to that 173.2. In Iowa, we found a good crop, but it was still below where we were at a year ago. The northern part of the state is going to help carry it, but it is not going to completely offset the lower yield that we saw in western Iowa.
Todd Gleason: So it is just about number of ears per acre, and grain fill cannot make up for that.
Lane Akre: We had record test weights the last two years, and given the nitrogen issues happening in the east, we saw it in western Illinois where things were starting to dry up. When we were in Ohio, we were in ankle-deep mud. When we were in Indiana, it was still muddy. Then Wednesday night, Indianapolis got another four and a half inches of rain, and Columbus got another five inches of rain. That crop is not going to have the nutrients it needs to put on a heavy enough ear to make up for that drop in ear counts and ear size.
Todd Gleason: Thank you much, we appreciate it.
Lane Akre: Thank you.
Todd Gleason: Lane Akre is an economist at Pro Farmer and wrapped up the Pro Farmer crop tour with the Pro Farmer national yields.
12:41 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
Todd Gleason: Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hello Eric, how are you today?
Eric Snodgrass: I am doing better. The weather is beautiful today finally and it is not pouring rain, so I am happy. I get to listen to my kids play in the marching band tonight. It is a good day as long as we just do not make anybody mad with discussions about yield.
Todd Gleason: High school football tonight, that is what we have going on right here and all over the Midwest. This is probably the start for everybody and should be a great weekend. In Illinois, it looks like a good night. Folks over in Wisconsin have had a tough day today too.
Eric Snodgrass: They have, and we do need to be watching radar tonight. Across the state, keep a lookout to your north just to see if anything shows up on the radar and starts moving south. It is a non-zero chance, so I want to watch it carefully. A big chunk of Illinois was under a slight risk today. We do not need another drop of rainfall, but there might be some scattered storms coming out of the north. Maybe they get here well after all the games are played.
Todd Gleason: What we do need is sunshine and some growing degree days to help finish this crop out, particularly the corn and soybeans. What do you see over the next couple of weeks?
Eric Snodgrass: The good news is we are drier. There is a pretty strong signal that we do not return back to the incredibly wet pattern that we have been in, where some parts of the state picked up over a foot of rainfall. Locally for us, it was right around six to nine inches just around Champaign-Urbana. Worse over in Indiana, wet over in parts of Nebraska and Iowa too. It seems as though the pattern is going to give us a bit of a break. There are several days of good sunshine coming in, and temperatures will start to rebound getting closer to the end of the month. We have actually been cooler than normal for several days now, and we are going to start to see climbing temperatures. Climbing temperatures late in August and September is way different than if we said that was happening in June and July, because we are losing daylight hours and losing solar angles slowly. It will have an impact, but I do not think we are going to have trouble getting the growing degree days we need to finish this season out well.
Todd Gleason: That will be good. With sunshine and the GDDs, we need to talk about what you have heard from the Nutrien Ag Solutions agronomists regarding crop size. There has been an awful lot of talk about tip back as the Pro Farmer crop tour made its way across the corn belt. What are your agronomists telling you?
Eric Snodgrass: The big story is about nitrogen. Given where things have been for the last couple of years, there is a lot of concern that maybe not enough was put on the crop last fall and early spring. Then we had an incredibly wet June. At the time we were welcoming the rain, and then we were saying wait a minute, that was way too much rain. The concern became whether we lost some of that to leaching and denitrification. Our good friend Matt Bennett has been flying over the crop a lot lately, and he has seen a lot of coloration changes. You couple that with the incredibly heavy rains we have seen as of late, and I have been getting asked if that helped or hurt. If you are in the low-lying areas and the spots near the river bottoms or flood-prone areas, it was bad. However, I drove to Indiana twice this week and drove over to McLean County for an event. I will tell you this: I drove through some of the hardest-hit spots in Indiana, all that water has drained away, and the crop honestly looks amazing in most places. I do not want to take an ounce away from the devastation in some of those towns, but looking at the crop, my biggest issue when I drove to McLean County was the wind damage that I could see outside of Bloomington. A lot of crop laying down. I stopped and looked, and I still think a lot of it is harvestable. I do not think it was completely flattened to the ground where you cannot get a combine under it.
Todd Gleason: It just takes a long time to get through it. It is harvestable.
Eric Snodgrass: It does. Yes. I think the other thing real quick is what can we get out of South America. This is going to be a big question to think about in the coming weeks. There is reason to believe the south is going to stay wet and the north is going to stay drier. The major story is whether they plant fast or not. I do not think they are, and that could be another bit of bullish news overall.
Todd Gleason: That is the other one that is important. Thank you much, particularly for the soybeans, we appreciate it.
Eric Snodgrass: You bet.
Todd Gleason: That is Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions and helped us to wrap up this edition of the Closing Market Report. If you can stay with us for the whole hour, you will hear all of Commodity Week. If not, it is on our website at willag.org right now and many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend.
The Pro Farmer national yield predictions released today present a sharply mixed outlook for this year's harvest, diverging significantly from recent USDA estimates. Pro Farmer pegs the national corn yield at just 173.2 bushels to the acre—down sharply from the USDA’s 180.7 estimate—driven primarily by lower ear counts and persistent nutrient loss across the rain-soaked eastern corn belt. Conversely, they project a record-breaking soybean crop at 53.3 bushels to the acre, supported by impressive pod counts and sufficient moisture to finish the crop out strong. Market analysts anticipate this divergence will prompt a bullish reaction in corn and pressure soybean prices, particularly as the trade looks ahead to critical late-September trade negotiations between the US and China. In the livestock sector, a newly announced plan to import 300,000 metric tons of African beef is expected to heavily pressure domestic cattle prices heading into the fall. Fortunately for Midwest row crops, the weather pattern is finally shifting toward a drier, sunnier trend that will provide the essential growing degree days needed to finish the season.
00:40 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch.com
07:29 Pro Farmer 173.2 Corn / 53.3 Soybean
12:41 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
---
Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 21st day of August, and we have a big day in front of us. Pro Farmer has released their national yield predictions. They put this year’s corn crop at 173.2 bushels to the acre. That is down sharply from the August estimate from USDA at 180.7. They put the soybean crop at a bigger crop, at 53.3 bushels to the acre. We will talk about that all in just a moment right here on the Closing Market Report.
00:40 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch.com
Todd Gleason: Mike Zuzolo of GlobalCommResearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, now joins us to talk about what has happened in Chicago for the week. Mike, the news is not the crop tour that took place, but the national numbers from Pro Farmer released at 1:30 today. They put the national yield for corn at 173.2 bushels to the acre, with a 15.344 billion bushel corn crop. That is way off where USDA had been in the August numbers. However, they were well above the soybean number, right at the trendline of 53.3, which USDA backed off of, and a 4.572 billion bushel soybean crop. If realized, that size soybean crop would be the largest ever harvested in the United States. They did use the acreage that USDA had in August as a reference. What is your reaction?
Mike Zuzolo: Todd, a week ago you and I talked about the tour and being concerned about big pod counts for soybeans, and that the trade was holding back on soybean potential upside even with Chinese buying because of this potential in the tour. That seems to have occurred with the 53.3 yield. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but I heard the pod counts were down all week long, so the 53.3 yield does surprise me some. What surprises me the most is being relatively higher on the yield when looking at the range of soybeans they came out with versus USDA, and not coming close to the yield number in corn. You could explain it through the idea that the grain fill and the tip back are going to bring the yields down in the corn, but that is probably a bridge too far for me right now to go from the 180.7 USDA number to 173.2 Pro Farmer. In the context of the problems we have seen in the eastern corn belt and bean belt, unless they see something indicating the extreme heavy rains would have hurt the corn more than the beans—which agronomically does not make sense—it is a tough one for me coming off a week where it has probably been the most bullish, price-friendly crop tour I can remember since 2012. With the beans not wanting to rally as much as the corn, we will close up about 6.5% to 7% in corn, and soybeans up about 4.2%. Part of this goes back to what has been happening in the Black Sea and Paris. Paris corn is at a three-and-a-half-year high regarding the cash price. The Paris futures hit 840 this week, a three-and-a-half-year high. My take is you can have one but not the other; one is too high or one is too low.
Todd Gleason: We can move on from that. We will see how the trade reacts on Sunday night to these numbers. It will be interesting to watch and see how that happens. It may be a quick reaction to USDA and then they get back to what they believe the marketplace might be.
Mike Zuzolo: To dovetail with that, they go through seven of the most important states in the corn belt production-wise. That is a fair assessment, but there are 18 states that USDA measures, and that will be the issue. This opens the door to buying more corn and selling more beans, especially if you do not have the Chinese trade relationship sitting in a good spot like it is right now. This is a big “if” because this weekend we will have an economic D-Day, as the Trump administration calls it, with Iran. China has been unequivocal in saying not to go too far with this because they will respond.
Todd Gleason: They have said they are not going to participate.
Mike Zuzolo: Exactly. This is the layover from what we talked about last week. It is continuing. We just do not know where the US and China are heading into the mid-to-late September meeting and state visit by President Xi.
Todd Gleason: The next important step is the USDA numbers in September, but really everyone will be waiting for that meeting at the end of September between President Xi and President Trump, and what, if anything, comes out of that deal.
Mike Zuzolo: Yes, I agree.
Todd Gleason: That will be about the time producers go to the field. Their marketing will be done at that point. It will be interesting to watch.
Mike Zuzolo: This is where the pod fill comes into place. Are we going to stay cool and disease-free these next 20 days for soybeans? Is it going to make the Pro Farmer number look right, or will it be very high because it matches up more with the corn? I take issue with the number of ears issue based upon my own survey with clients. They are talking about 12 to 14 around, not 16 to 18 around in central and southern Illinois this year. They are not talking about issues with the number of ears on the plants.
Todd Gleason: Beef cattle, what is on the line?
Mike Zuzolo: This comes in the context of the Trump administration announcing Friday taking on 300,000 metric tons of African beef that will be at 25% below current market prices. It is with the idea that they will try and pull prices down during this last grilling season ahead of the election. It is resoundingly coming across Friday from my cattlemen and cattlewomen clients that they are not going to retain, and this will be a really big hit to the marketplace if cattle prices stay weak. The Cattle on Feed report Friday is a super important number of head on feed. I am hoping President Trump redirects and reverses this course before the end of the weekend because it will create a tighter cattle supply domestically, and we will rely more upon imports in the foreseeable future.
Todd Gleason: Thank you much, Mike. Mike Zuzolo is at GlobalCommResearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, and joined us on this Friday edition of the Closing Market Report. Find it online, listen again at willag.org.
07:29 Pro Farmer 173.2 Corn / 53.3 Soybean
Todd Gleason: We are now joined by Pro Farmer economist Lane Akre. He is traveling back to his home after being on the road all week with the tour and has an update with the Pro Farmer national yields. These are not the tour yields, but the national yields. Lane, thank you for being with us. What did you find?
Lane Akre: Thanks for having me. The eastern part of the corn belt has struggled a lot, and we have seen lower ear counts and smaller ears than a year ago. That pulled down what we expect out of this crop. On the corn side, we ended up with an average yield of 173.2 bushels to the acre. We have a 1% band on either side of that, from 175 down to 171.5. We reviewed the FSA planted acreage estimates that NASS used in that latest crop production report. We do not feel strongly that the number is going to shift one way or the other. There might be a slight downtick in harvested acreage, but we are not going to try to put a pin on that number, so we are using USDA’s harvested acre figure. We have a national production of 15.344 billion bushels. On the soybean side, we found some pretty impressive beans. The moisture is there to help the crop finish out, and we are anticipating a record soybean yield this year, topping last year’s record. We anticipate the national average yield at 53.3 bushels to the acre. We use a 2% band on soybeans, up to 54.4 bushels down to 52.2. Again, we are using USDA’s harvested acres there, production of 4.572 billion bushels, which would be a record. The pods are impressive. What we found in Iowa and Illinois showed that, while we only found one state that had more pods versus a year ago—which was Minnesota with a very impressive soybean and corn crop—we think the moisture the crop has and the way it will finish could propel that yield to a record.
Todd Gleason: Repeat to me what your number was for corn.
Lane Akre: 173.2.
Todd Gleason: How did you get to that number? USDA was at 180.7 in August. What was it that was in the crop scout reports that drove the number lower?
Lane Akre: It was a combination of those lower ear counts, especially in the eastern part of the corn belt. Typically, when you have those lower ear counts, you are going to see bigger ears. The crop has got more nutrients and sunlight, and is able to throw on a bigger ear. But the weather challenges that the corn belt in general has faced just did not allow for that to happen. We saw a very big discrepancy between where USDA had the crop in that August report—which was survey-based and using NDVI data, and incorporating the crop progress report—and what was found in the field. There is no objective yield data in that August report from USDA. Using our historical spread between where the tour all-sample averages are for the state and the USDA final, we were 20 bushels away in Indiana and Illinois. When you see a 20-bushel drop in those two states, that national yield number is going to fall, and that helped push our national average yield down to that 173.2. In Iowa, we found a good crop, but it was still below where we were at a year ago. The northern part of the state is going to help carry it, but it is not going to completely offset the lower yield that we saw in western Iowa.
Todd Gleason: So it is just about number of ears per acre, and grain fill cannot make up for that.
Lane Akre: We had record test weights the last two years, and given the nitrogen issues happening in the east, we saw it in western Illinois where things were starting to dry up. When we were in Ohio, we were in ankle-deep mud. When we were in Indiana, it was still muddy. Then Wednesday night, Indianapolis got another four and a half inches of rain, and Columbus got another five inches of rain. That crop is not going to have the nutrients it needs to put on a heavy enough ear to make up for that drop in ear counts and ear size.
Todd Gleason: Thank you much, we appreciate it.
Lane Akre: Thank you.
Todd Gleason: Lane Akre is an economist at Pro Farmer and wrapped up the Pro Farmer crop tour with the Pro Farmer national yields.
12:41 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
Todd Gleason: Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hello Eric, how are you today?
Eric Snodgrass: I am doing better. The weather is beautiful today finally and it is not pouring rain, so I am happy. I get to listen to my kids play in the marching band tonight. It is a good day as long as we just do not make anybody mad with discussions about yield.
Todd Gleason: High school football tonight, that is what we have going on right here and all over the Midwest. This is probably the start for everybody and should be a great weekend. In Illinois, it looks like a good night. Folks over in Wisconsin have had a tough day today too.
Eric Snodgrass: They have, and we do need to be watching radar tonight. Across the state, keep a lookout to your north just to see if anything shows up on the radar and starts moving south. It is a non-zero chance, so I want to watch it carefully. A big chunk of Illinois was under a slight risk today. We do not need another drop of rainfall, but there might be some scattered storms coming out of the north. Maybe they get here well after all the games are played.
Todd Gleason: What we do need is sunshine and some growing degree days to help finish this crop out, particularly the corn and soybeans. What do you see over the next couple of weeks?
Eric Snodgrass: The good news is we are drier. There is a pretty strong signal that we do not return back to the incredibly wet pattern that we have been in, where some parts of the state picked up over a foot of rainfall. Locally for us, it was right around six to nine inches just around Champaign-Urbana. Worse over in Indiana, wet over in parts of Nebraska and Iowa too. It seems as though the pattern is going to give us a bit of a break. There are several days of good sunshine coming in, and temperatures will start to rebound getting closer to the end of the month. We have actually been cooler than normal for several days now, and we are going to start to see climbing temperatures. Climbing temperatures late in August and September is way different than if we said that was happening in June and July, because we are losing daylight hours and losing solar angles slowly. It will have an impact, but I do not think we are going to have trouble getting the growing degree days we need to finish this season out well.
Todd Gleason: That will be good. With sunshine and the GDDs, we need to talk about what you have heard from the Nutrien Ag Solutions agronomists regarding crop size. There has been an awful lot of talk about tip back as the Pro Farmer crop tour made its way across the corn belt. What are your agronomists telling you?
Eric Snodgrass: The big story is about nitrogen. Given where things have been for the last couple of years, there is a lot of concern that maybe not enough was put on the crop last fall and early spring. Then we had an incredibly wet June. At the time we were welcoming the rain, and then we were saying wait a minute, that was way too much rain. The concern became whether we lost some of that to leaching and denitrification. Our good friend Matt Bennett has been flying over the crop a lot lately, and he has seen a lot of coloration changes. You couple that with the incredibly heavy rains we have seen as of late, and I have been getting asked if that helped or hurt. If you are in the low-lying areas and the spots near the river bottoms or flood-prone areas, it was bad. However, I drove to Indiana twice this week and drove over to McLean County for an event. I will tell you this: I drove through some of the hardest-hit spots in Indiana, all that water has drained away, and the crop honestly looks amazing in most places. I do not want to take an ounce away from the devastation in some of those towns, but looking at the crop, my biggest issue when I drove to McLean County was the wind damage that I could see outside of Bloomington. A lot of crop laying down. I stopped and looked, and I still think a lot of it is harvestable. I do not think it was completely flattened to the ground where you cannot get a combine under it.
Todd Gleason: It just takes a long time to get through it. It is harvestable.
Eric Snodgrass: It does. Yes. I think the other thing real quick is what can we get out of South America. This is going to be a big question to think about in the coming weeks. There is reason to believe the south is going to stay wet and the north is going to stay drier. The major story is whether they plant fast or not. I do not think they are, and that could be another bit of bullish news overall.
Todd Gleason: That is the other one that is important. Thank you much, particularly for the soybeans, we appreciate it.
Eric Snodgrass: You bet.
Todd Gleason: That is Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions and helped us to wrap up this edition of the Closing Market Report. If you can stay with us for the whole hour, you will hear all of Commodity Week. If not, it is on our website at willag.org right now and many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend.