Aug 25 | Closing Market Report

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This is a summary of the August 25, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report. In today's program, Naomi Blohm of Total Farm Marketing analyzed current agricultural markets, highlighting an inside trading day for corn and beans while cautioning that a lack of fresh bullish news could lead to a near-term price pullback. She also emphasized the ongoing impacts of Canadian trade tensions and global conflicts on market stability. The broadcast then detailed practical cover crop and no-till management strategies from Illinois farmers Adam Dahmer, Brent Fowler, and Greg Thoren. They stressed the necessity of proper equipment calibration, adjusting planting angles to avoid old corn rows, and utilizing cover crops for targeted erosion control. Finally, Don Day of Day Weather outlined the agricultural forecast, noting a favorable shift toward warmer, drier conditions in the Corn Belt for late August, while advising producers to monitor potential tropical development heading into September.

00:42 Ag Markets with Naomi Blohm, Total Farm Marketing
05:59 Cover Crop Conversations: practical management advice
20:09 Ag Weather with Don Day, Day Weather

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Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report for the 25th day of August 2026. I’m Extension’s Todd Gleason. Away from the offices this afternoon hosting a farm legacy webinar in Mount Vernon, so no update of the actual commodity finishes for the day, but we will talk with Naomi Blohm. We’ll hear about nutrient loss and how three farmers in the state are working to improve their lands, and then we’ll finish up our conversation by discussing the weather forecast. Don Day will be here on this Tuesday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media.

Announce: Todd Gleason’s services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.

00:42 Ag Markets with Naomi Blohm, Total Farm Marketing
Todd Gleason: Naomi Blohm from TotalFarmMarketing.com out of West Bend, Wisconsin, now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hi, Naomi. Thank you for being with us. I’m interested to know what you think of today’s trade in context with yesterday, the information that came out last week from the Pro Farmer Crop Tour, and where you think this marketplace might be headed.

Naomi Blohm: Today we’re having what I would call an inside trading day. Prices for the corn and bean market have essentially just stuck within the trading range from yesterday. Yesterday we had higher values because of the Pro Farmer numbers for corn coming in so much smaller than what the USDA had pegged. That’s definitely supportive. But now, between yesterday’s price high and the price action today, it almost feels like the market is saying we need some more fresh, friendly news or we might be running out of some short-term bullish steam here. We’re seeing that also with some of the technical indicators. The market is very overbought on RSI levels close to 70. We’re seeing the stochastic lines in the overbought territory starting to potentially cross into sell signals. If we don’t get any fresh, friendly news this week, it wouldn’t surprise me if we see a simple price pullback. I don’t think we’re going to crash and burn from here just because the fundamentals underlying this marketplace right now are so supportive, but maybe a 15- to 20-cent correction on corn or a 30-cent correction on soybeans might be in the wheelhouse here. We’re also going to see some position squaring with the September grains because we’re heading into First Notice Day, so that affects cash markets, basis markets, futures markets. First Notice Day is on Monday next week, so things have to get priced, rolled, or closed out by the end of business on Friday. We’re going to see a little bit of that. The other thing to keep in mind is what we’re watching for outside markets this week. We’ve got some potentially big news from the Fed coming regarding interest rates, and lots of different outside market activities that can affect the market as much as just our regular grain market news.

Todd Gleason: Let’s take up a couple of those things. One of them will be just to the north of your home state, Wisconsin. That would be Canada, and the tariff and potential trade war that might be kicking off. They’re the largest buyer of ethanol—our export market, that is. That could pressure corn. I don’t know whether it has yet at this time or not. Then, of course, there are issues still related to the war in Iran, and that could push energy prices even higher. And the war in Ukraine, which could constrain the amount of corn and wheat coming out of both Ukraine and Russia. Which are the most important things you’re watching?

Naomi Blohm: How about yes, yes, and yes. They’re all very important. To your point with everything happening with Canada, they’re pushing back against the United States, and they’re throwing some data and different trade initiatives back in our face here to try to keep that conversation going. It not only affects ethanol, it affects dairy markets as well. It is definitely an issue that we have to keep front and center because it does affect American agriculture. Then, with things in the Middle East, monitoring that as well. Crude oil over the last few days has had about a four- to five-dollar pullback because things have simmered down over there a little bit. With Russia and Ukraine, the headlines continue to change every other day. It sounds like they’re still trying to work on ways to make sure they can get the grain markets exported and the grain product exported, but every other day is a different headline. Balancing all of those things is going to be the trickiest component for the market for the rest of this week, along with month-end position squaring. There are a lot of facets to be monitoring. Again, for those of you who are waiting for those higher prices, big picture, they could come, but it might take a few months to get there. If you’ve been dragging your heels on any old crop sales, you’ve got September corn futures up near five dollars today. It’s a great opportunity. I did not think we would get this high on September corn futures. We’re heading into First Notice Day, so those good values may start to slip away.

Todd Gleason: As we were talking yesterday with our analysts, they were of a mind that producers were taking advantage of these prices. Is that what you’re hearing, or are producers simply calling you and asking whether they should or not?

Naomi Blohm: They are definitely making the sales because they are aware of the value that’s there. Harvest feels like it might be starting to happen sooner rather than later in some places, just with as dry as it’s been in some locations.

Todd Gleason: Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Naomi.

Naomi Blohm: Thank you.

Announce: Naomi Blohm is with TotalFarmMarketing.com.

Announce: You’re listening to the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world. Our theme music is written, performed, produced, and courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason.

05:59 Cover Crop Conversations: practical management advice
Todd Gleason: Today we’ll hear from our Nutrient Loss Reduction podcast. Episode 84 was just released. It is the third in a three-part series called Cover Crop Conversations, and we’ll hear again from three farmers. This time, they’ll provide advice about the hard lessons they’ve learned over the decades, and more importantly, the practical things someone new—or even experienced, for that matter—can and likely should deploy. Our program comes from a longer webinar when the three sat down with University of Illinois Extension’s Rachel Curry to talk openly about their operations. As we’ve told you in the past, they are from vastly different parts of the state. Adam Dahmer farms in deep southern Illinois, not so far from the Ohio River. Brent Fowler’s farm sits halfway between the Illinois and the Mississippi Rivers in McDonough County. Greg Thoren farms in the driftless region of the northwestern corner of the prairie state in Jo Daviess County. Today we’ll hear their final thoughts on using cover crops as explored in the webinar and some down-to-earth practical management advice. We’ll start with seeding a cover crop. Adam Dahmer likes to have it flown on, but not with a plane.

Adam Dahmer: Planting, like I touched on earlier, we’ve tried it all. We’ve pretty well settled on aerial applying with a drone before harvest with standing corn, and then we drill after soybean harvest. With that being said, we still monitor soil moisture because there’s no advantage to throwing seed out in a drought, running the risk that we get a small rain, it germinates, and dies because it doesn’t have enough moisture to survive. We do keep that monitored as we look at establishing the cover crop. As we go into the spring, I’ve done it all, from roller crimping to terminating the ryegrass right after it breaks dormancy. Where we’re settling right now, we’re taking the ryegrass out after the second time we mow our yard. That’s about ideal to take the ryegrass out because it is such a dense root structure. With the weather patterns we’ve experienced over the past 24 months, I can’t have the amount of top growth that I like to have due to the extensive amount of rainfall I’ve received in my area. The last two falls have been prohibitive on getting legumes established. If we can get legumes established, we’ll still take the ryegrass out early and leave the legumes to bloom. Maximum nitrogen production takes place right at bloom, so we try to get it to that point. As far as planting the cash crop and so forth, you really have to pay attention to how your equipment is set up because you want good openers, you want good closing wheels, and you have to pay attention to what works best on your operation. About ten years ago, a group of farmers in my area got together, tried many different types of closing wheels and so forth to see what was working best, and did some studies. That proved to be excellent research for all of us and helped guide what we were looking at. Nonetheless, what was working on some farms wasn’t working for other farmers. Termination-wise, when we look at terminating the cover crop, I’ve done it with a drone, and we do it with a ground rig. Last year we did not get it killed as timely as I wished we would have, and that cost us some heartache as we moved forward, but all in all, that’s pretty well how we approach it.

Todd Gleason: Again, that’s Adam Dahmer. He’s from Williamson County, Illinois, and just put forth a two-and-a-half-minute primer on managing a cover crop. Now let’s turn to Brent Fowler. Again, he’s in the western part of Illinois, in the middle part of the state, and has some advice—not exactly on cover crops, but on the transition many producers make on the way to cover crops. That’s with no-till.

Brent Fowler: This is one thing that I was excited to talk about. The reason is because I tried no-till about 25 years ago, and mistakes were made. I remember thinking I’m done with this no-till stuff, there’s no way. I was sitting here this morning making a list of the mistakes I made. Number one was probably quitting tillage cold turkey on the field we tried this on. That might be a little bit of a mistake. If I picked up my neighbor’s field here that has heavy tillage, and that field was corn stalks before beans, I don’t think I would plan on no-tilling the beans. I would probably take a vertical tillage tool and chop up that residue because it takes a few years to get your microorganisms cooking and breaking down the residue. Residue is a problem for us anyway. So the first mistake we made was probably not trying to gradually work into no-till. The next one was we did not increase our seeding rate. When you’re in no-till, rough conditions, cereal rye, all that stuff, I think it’s important to increase your soybean seeding rate. We did increase our down pressure, but we probably didn’t increase it enough. One thing with no-till in these years is it takes a lot of down pressure sometimes to penetrate this really hard ground in certain conditions, especially on the really white dirt. On the black dirt, it seems like you can get by with anything, but on the tough timber soil, that can turn to concrete. Maybe the cover crops might help with that. Another thing we didn’t do that was probably the easiest thing in the world to do—if I could go back and tell my younger self of 25 years ago to do one thing differently, I’d tell myself to plant the beans at an angle. So easy to do, costs nothing. What happens is, if we plant exactly straight, the same as we had planted the corn, we get a disk opener that gets stuck on top of the prior year’s corn stalk row, and we’re not getting the depth on those rows. If you’re on 15-inch row beans and you have half of them directly on top of the prior year’s corn row, that’s not going to go well. Planting on an angle gets those disc openers off of those corn rows for a higher percentage of the time. That was a big mistake. What happened? We just had horrible stands of beans for a couple of years. We didn’t increase our seeding rate, we didn’t have enough down pressure, and we didn’t plant at an angle, and we had a horrible stand. That caused a lot of our yield problems. Another part of it, being 23 at the time, I did not know that the beans would be shorter. Now I know that is to be expected, but we’re not in a competition to see how tall our plants can get; we want pods. It doesn’t matter how tall it is. When you’re 23 and the beans are shorter, that’s a problem. I remember being in the combine, and we didn’t have scales on the grain cart back in the year 2000 like we do now, so we didn’t really have a good way of weighing a test anyway. I’ll be honest with you, just in the combine seeing that the beans were shorter, I had already made up my mind: I did not want no-till. Now that I’m older and know to expect that, it’s still a little hard when you drive down the road and look at the neighbor’s beans and they’re 10 inches taller than yours. It’s definitely harder for my dad and my oldest son.

Todd Gleason: The practical advice Brent Fowler really is talking about there is to discuss the transitions that you want to make with producers who have already made them. Planting on an angle or just moving the line seven and a half inches over will be really helpful in no-till. What kinds of things might you expect in differences in a growing crop because of the no-till environment? Adam Dahmer said it best, really, as he was wrapping up that webinar with Rachel Curry.

Adam Dahmer: Do your own research, take a part of your farm, try new things, pay attention to your equipment on what’s working and what’s not working, and don’t be afraid to spend a couple thousand dollars on your planter to completely enhance your operation based off performance. Get out of the tractor seat and see what’s actually taking place on your operation.

Brent Fowler: From my earlier story, I guess I’m probably a poster child for what can go wrong if you don’t do any research. One of the things that we do on our farm that I think is different than almost all of our farmers in this area is we follow our bean combine with our old 750 drill, and we put triticale up the most erodible spots immediately after bean harvest. The reason why I think that’s important is we don’t have a lot of erosion problems on corn stalks before beans, but we do have horrible erosion at times on bean stubble before corn. I remember several years ago after we had done these tests and proven that the reduced till was just as profitable or maybe a little more profitable, I remember being so excited that with no-till we were going to be done with all the erosion. We were going to be done with gullies. It wasn’t the case. We actually started having erosion trouble on soybean stubble even with no-till because our residue decomposes so fast. I remember reading about that from an older guy who wrote that, and I thought he was crazy, but it happened to us. That’s where cover crops come in. We really see the erosion still happen on soybean stubble. If nothing else, if you don’t do anything else with cover crops, if you don’t want to do the whole field with cereal rye or triticale, take a small drill and at least drill those really erodible spots—the repeat offenders, that’s what we call them on our farm. Where you fill them in and they wash out again even with no-till, go in and get some cover crop on those areas. Cover crop is the silver bullet when it comes to erosion control.

Greg Thoren: We as farmers grow plants. That’s what we do.

Todd Gleason: This is Greg Thoren. He’s the farmer from Jo Daviess County.

Greg Thoren: Whether we use those as an income source—corn and beans and wheat and various other plants—using cover crops, we’re just planting or seeding different plants. One nice thing with these cover crops is they’re out there longer throughout the year, which we should be delighted to see as farmers because we see more green in the field. That actually relates back to more soil life, cleaner water, cleaner air, and the whole system is what was shown here today. Everything that we should be doing should be to regenerate the soil, and I believe the participants here today have shown that.

Todd Gleason: Practical advice from three no-tillers who use cover crops. It’s part of the Cover Crops Conversations series on the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction podcast. You can find it on our website at willag.org under the podcast tab.

20:09 Ag Weather with Don Day, Day Weather
Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention to the weather forecast. Don Day is here from Day Weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Hello, Don. Thanks for being with us.

Don Day: Thanks for having me.

Todd Gleason: Let’s start in the United States. We’ve had a lot of rain in many parts of the Corn Belt, but there’s some sunshine. They were hoping for a little warmer weather as well, looks like all of that’s going to take place. Can you tell me about the next couple of weeks?

Don Day: I think it’s a very favorable regime. The amount of rain that we see over the next week will be considerably less than it’s been. It won’t be completely dry, but the activity will be down considerably. The warmer temperatures are coming, especially to the western areas—Iowa, Missouri, parts of northern and western Illinois. You get a little bit further east, temperatures are going to be closer to average for the eastern Corn Belt and the Ohio Valley area. We’re still going to be very warm down in parts of the southern plains. The overall trend is less rain and a bit warmer.

Todd Gleason: When you look into September, do you see things changing at all?

Don Day: We do. Beginning at the first of the month, early next week, we’re going to see patterns shifting around a little bit. We’re actually going to see some cooler weather invade the Pacific Northwest, parts of western and central areas of Canada. I’d call it the first cool front of late summer. That’s going to bring about a shift in the jet stream pattern and realign things, meaning the high-pressure center which has been over the central and south-central U.S. for several weeks is going to shift more to the southeastern United States. That’s going to allow low pressure to slip into the western half of the country. When that happens, as we get into late August and early September, this is when we need to start watching the Atlantic a little bit more for the possibility of tropical development because that’s a much more favorable pattern.

Todd Gleason: When that does happen, if the Atlantic becomes active and there’s tropical development, does that mean a wet sort of September for us, or do we just not know yet?

Don Day: We don’t know yet because we’ve got to watch to see. Fighting El Niños is really hard to get the Atlantic tropical season going. That’s really been knocking it down so far. However, you can expect that if we do see that increased activity, parts of the east and southeast should see an uptick in precipitation. We also may see moisture come into the southwestern United States from tropical activity in the Pacific. I think both the Atlantic and the Pacific are going to have a big say in how September is going to go.

Todd Gleason: Thank you very much, Don.

Don Day: Thank you.

Announce: That’s Don Day. He is with Day Weather out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Joined us on this Tuesday edition of the Closing Market Report. It came to you from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world, online on demand at willag.org. I’m Extension’s Todd Gleason.