- Andrew Margenot, University of Illinois
- Carl Bradley, University of Kentucky
- Don Day, DayWeather.com
From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market reported as the January 2026. I'm extension's Todd Gleeson at the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association meeting in Peoria. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Naomi Bloem from Total Farm Marketing out of West Bend, Wisconsin. We'll hear from a couple of crop scientists, Andrew Marganaut from the University of Illinois, about soil types and whether they can be changed. And we'll hear from Carl Bradley, actually, from University of Kentucky, plant pathologist, who used to be with Uofime but was here in Peoria to discuss red crown rot in soybeans.
Todd Gleason: 00:39And as we close out our time together, we'll take a look at the weather forecast too with Don Day. He's a day weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. Naomi Blohm from Total Farm Marketing in West Bend, Wisconsin. That's totalfarmmarketing.com online now joins us to take a look at the marketplace.
Todd Gleason: 01:03Hi, Naomi. Thanks for being with us. After the holiday, how did trade, ensue in Chicago overnight and then during the day trade?
Naomi Blohm: 01:13It was pretty quiet actually for the grain markets, coming off of the three day holiday weekend. A little bit of two sided trade action pretty much everywhere. But ultimately, the grain markets finished the day just slightly lower, corn down about a penny, beans down about 4¢, Chicago wheat down, about 6 to 7¢. Everything's still trading in recent trading ranges, still trying to digest the January WASDE report and trying to figure out where to go from here.
Todd Gleason: 01:44And where do you think producers should believe this market is going, and how do you think they should manage it?
Naomi Blohm: 01:51Yeah. So just very much in the short term, it feels like the market may be in a new consolidation sideways trading pattern where March corn ultimately has really solid support at four ten. That was the August low, but resistance now is gonna be at four thirty five. Over at the soybean market, there's good support at the ten fifty area, resistance at ten seventy five, and March Chicago wheat having good support at the $5 area. So traders right now, will be focused, I think, still, we're looking to see if the tariffs are going to be viewed as legal or not.
Naomi Blohm: 02:24We are hopeful of some new biofuel, blending mandates that would be hopefully coming out here in March. And, course, we have to keep an eye on all of the extreme geopolitical news that's happening all over the world right now. Any one of those things could, trigger, higher or lower price movement just depending on what is said, not said, or how it's interpreted.
Todd Gleason: 02:47On that note, were you impressed that the trade dismissed mostly until it might come to fruition, which I suppose would be by February 1, the president's, threat of tariffs on eight EU nations.
Naomi Blohm: 03:00Yeah. That was, part of the bigger headlines coming into this morning, and that seems to have affected, like, the mini Dow or the the S and P and stock market a little bit more than ag trade. But, you know, for Pete's sake, the grain markets have taken such a hit here recently. They're on tremendous long term support and long term technical support as well if you're looking at charts. It feels like the market wants to, you know, keep an eye on upcoming South American weather, especially as we're getting into just the the heart of that growing season and starting to think ahead even on acreage here in The United States, keeping also an eye on the funds and the fund traders.
Naomi Blohm: 03:44Now we have funds short, about 80,000 contracts of corn, still long about 12,000 contracts of soybeans according to the most, recent commitment of traders report. And in Chicago wheat, they're short a 106,000 contracts. So it feels like some of the negativity is now priced into the marketplace for the grains, and we're waiting for some fresh news.
Todd Gleason: 04:06Anything that we can watch for out of South America as most weather folks are thinking a transition from La Nina to El Nino could happen more quickly? And is is there a problem that could develop there? I don't know that there is one at this point.
Naomi Blohm: 04:23Yeah. Nothing really at this moment, and that's part of the reason why grain prices are just staying a little bit suppressed here. But at any time, if the weather patterns shift quickly, that can affect, filling for soybeans for pods, could affect potentially harvest for soybeans. And then, of course, as we get the second crop corn planted right after soybean harvest, that's gonna be the one that the traders really keep an eye on is that second crop safrinha corn, 75% of their production down in Brazil.
Todd Gleason: 04:53Year in and year out, and I'd like you to turn your attention to the weather and livestock. During the wintertime, there are cold months. They do cause issues logistically and sometimes, simply with the livestock themselves, especially beef cattle in the Western Part of The United States. Are there concerns in the coming seven to ten days in some areas of The United States?
Naomi Blohm: 05:14Well, definitely, there are concerns with just how much of this cold weather is coming, and it sounds like there's gonna be some wintry mix in the Southern Midwest. So something to definitely keep an eye on. I feel that, like, the livestock market may be focused on this Friday's cattle on feed report. Also, keeping an eye on just continued news and rumors of screwworm in Mexico and if it's making its way north. Now on the cattle on feed report, pre report estimates just came out today.
Naomi Blohm: 05:44So the on feed pre report average estimate, 96.8. The placement number at 92.7 for an average estimate with a range of 88 to 95, and that marketed number up at 101.7. So that's what we're looking at going into Friday afternoon's cattle on feed report. Of course, keeping an eye on the weather is how that would, pertain to the cattle complex, and then also keeping an eye on all of the happenings in Mexico with screwworm.
Todd Gleason: 06:14Hey. Thanks much. We'll talk with you again next week.
Naomi Blohm: 06:16Thank you.
Todd Gleason: 06:17That's Naomi Bloom. She is with totalfarmmarketing.com out of West Bend, Wisconsin. Joined us here on the closing market report that came to you from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the Farming World online on demand at willag.org. We're now joined by Andrew Marganaut from Crop Sciences here on the Urbana Champaign campus of the U of I.
Todd Gleason: 06:46He made a presentation during the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association meeting this week held in Peoria. I'm looking at a couple of We will talk about the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Morrill Plus and you are heading that celebration up this year. However, your discussion was surrounding some of the changes that can happen just because of farming practices with soils and whether or not it was possible to change one soil type to another and how erosion plays into this as well. So let's start with the erosion piece, which is where you began this presentation. You dropped a slide up showing erosion, I believe, both in the hills and the hollers, what I'll call the hills and hollers of Iowa because it rolls a lot.
Todd Gleason: 07:39That state, while there are some flat places, really, really rolls, and they lose a lot of soil or can. And then in Illinois, when I saw it come up, I thought that appears to be some of the flattest land in Illinois that you have highlighted, South Of Springfield and running through Eppingham and some of those places. So tell me why you highlighted those two places and what the point was as it was related to erosion.
Andrew Margenot: 08:10Sure. We think of erosion as being really only a problem for more rolling terrain like what you've pointed out about Iowa. I'd argue the South Of Illinois probably is a bit more rolling and has similar losses of anywhere from two to 10 tons of sediment per acre. I want to point out here that erosion is not a loss in the sense of we're not evaporating soil. We're just moving it.
Andrew Margenot: 08:35Now that's still a problem because we're denuding the high ground and we're pushing the topsoil downhill. But still that's a challenge. So the question that we have is what if you're not in the rolling ground? What if you're on the flat and black as you pointed out? Is there appreciable erosion occurring there?
Andrew Margenot: 08:53And we showed with some NREC funded project data that, yeah, there's something going on. If you think about less than 1% slope, drummer, flat and black, Champaign County, we're losing about 200 to 300 pounds of soil per acre. So that's about point 1.2 ton, not the five or 10 ton per acre of Iowa, but it's still something. And the point that I was trying to illustrate is that, well, you do that over twenty, fifty, thirty years and you're still losing several tons of soil per acre.
Todd Gleason: 09:28Then you transition to how this can change the soil profile, just the farming practice itself. And you pointed to some rice patty soils out of China and the difference between farming for fifteen hundred years and a hundred years and how the soils have changed and can change. It was the same soil, actually.
Andrew Margenot: 09:51That's right. The example I showed is an extreme case that illustrates how farming land can change soil types. Example was rice paddies, is a bit more extreme because you're flooding the field for months and that changes the iron by reduction. But it was to point out that where we've been farming for millennia, so North Europe, China, North Africa, like Egypt, we know that we've transformed soils. The question is within the one hundred and fifty years of intensive ag of Illinois, have we also changed soils?
Andrew Margenot: 10:23And then the evidence that I presented after that was, I think we have reason to think that we're altering soil types. To quote one farmer, is drummer still drummer? And the answer is, in some places, it's not. It's lesser.
Todd Gleason: 10:38How does it change? And can you change it back, do you suppose?
Andrew Margenot: 10:41The last question is an absolute yes. We can change it. But here, a can as a potential separate from how feasible or how difficult. How have these soils changed? Well, one is by thinning the topsoil.
Andrew Margenot: 10:57A thinner black topsoil will change soil type. Also by tiling in the subsurface, we aerate the soil. Now this can be good and bad and personally I think there's trade offs here. I don't want to say that soil change is always a bad thing. And as I showed, some soils are now more fertile.
Andrew Margenot: 11:14They have more organic matter than eighty years ago after corn soybean production for eighty years. So we should be careful in thinking excuse me, in not thinking that change is always a bad thing. We can change soils back and forth. The key is that we've not been really thinking about or able to measure how we've changed them.
Todd Gleason: 11:35Now let's make a tangential now let's make a transition to the Morrow Platz, relatively speaking, but stay with soils across the state because there is a soil library on campus that goes back all the way to the Civil War and those locations are known. You're in the process of trying to update them with new soil samples to see how soils have changed.
Andrew Margenot: 12:03That's right. We have soil samples and these are not top soils, these are all the way down the profile to three foot depth and we have notebooks with soil data. In both cases we know the time of sampling down to the day, we know the exact location within about 10 to 20 yards. Because of this, by resampling that spot and comparing the soil properties at the time of sampling as far back as 1861 with the soil properties today, we can make some pretty useful inferences on soil change.
Todd Gleason: 12:36Finally, you are ushering now the moral plots on campus. The oldest experimental plots in The United States, the second oldest on the planet, celebrating their one hundred and fiftieth year this year. What kind of things can we expect from the College of ACEs Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences over this twelve month period?
Andrew Margenot: 13:00That's right. We will be putting in the hundred and fiftieth corn crop into the ground this spring for the Morroplots. And then around harvest, 2026, we plan to have a multi event celebration of the one fiftieth, the sesquicentennial of the world's second oldest continuous experiment. By the way, for corn, it is the world's oldest continuous ag trial. We're going to have two kinds of celebration, but also discussion.
Andrew Margenot: 13:32One is going to be where we will have scientists from around the world that steward their country's longest running trials, like the English Rothenstedt from 1843, like in Poland as well from I believe the eighteen nineties. We're going to bring together scientists and policymakers and farmers to have discussions on what have we learned about soil change and crop yields over the last century. There's also going to be a display of the new Morrow Plots, the Morrow Plots two point zero. What is the next 150 of Illinois ag going to look like? And to do this, we have developed a new trial called the alma mater plots.
Andrew Margenot: 14:12It's inspired by the Morrow Plots, but it's being designed with farmer inputs to begin in 2028 to address the challenges of Illinois ag of the twenty first century.
Todd Gleason: 14:22We look forward to talking with you more over the next twelve months about this celebration, and thank you for joining us here at the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association.
Andrew Margenot: 14:30Thanks, Todd. Happy to talk.
Todd Gleason: 14:31Andrew Margenaut is with Crop Sciences at the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association meeting in Peoria. We're now joined by Carl Bradley with University of Kentucky. He is a plant pathologist, made a presentation in part on red Crown Rot. This is a disease of soybeans that has been experienced particularly in the Western Part of Illinois but has been moving across the state and other places. First, can you tell me a little bit about Red Crown Rot, the disease it itself, where it has been and where it could be found not only in Illinois but other parts of the nation?
Carl Bradley: 15:06Yeah, good question. So Red Crown Rot is kind of an emerging disease for our area. It was first found in Illinois in 2018 in Pike County was the first place and then it's been found a lot of other counties now in Illinois. We found it in Kentucky for the first time in 2021. And then since then it's been found in basically all the states around Illinois except Iowa.
Carl Bradley: 15:27It's been found in Missouri and Wisconsin, Minnesota recently and Ohio as well. So several states and Indiana as well. Several states that are being affected by red crown rot. It's a fungal disease. The pathogen lives in the soil, infects roots, but we see foliar symptoms from it that look a lot like those that we see with sudden death syndrome or SDS.
Carl Bradley: 15:52Interveinal chlorosis and necrosis in those leaves causes plants to die prematurely and of course that leads to yield loss.
Todd Gleason: 16:01So we know SDS can be an issue and the problems that come with it and the death in these large areas that can just simply not have a yield. Is Red Crown Rot on the same scale of issue as it's related to yield loss?
Carl Bradley: 16:18Yes, definitely. I would say that the risk is greater because we don't really have the varieties that we have for SDS, like we have good, good varieties with SDS resistance whereas seed companies are still doing a lot of breeding for resistance to Red Crown Rot. So a lot of our varieties are still fairly susceptible to Red Crown Rot.
Todd Gleason: 16:39So let's talk about how you do identify Red Crown Rot in a field. Does it happen have to happen during the season and when you see what you think are symptoms of an issue and maybe you think of SDS and I don't know where you look.
Carl Bradley: 16:55Yeah, great question. So the symptoms are very similar to SDS in regards to the foliar symptoms but there are some other symptoms that are different. So again, the foliar symptoms would be that interveinal sclerosis. And what I mean by that is on the leaves, the veins stay green and the tissue between the veins turn yellow and then die. And we don't see that generally until we get to at least after flowering in soybean.
Carl Bradley: 17:23So that happens later. But along with that, we see some reddish discoloration that can happen on the lower stem and roots. And then the fungus produces these structures called Parathecia. And those are kind of red orange spherical shaped structures that develop on the lower stem and roots very late in the season. We don't always see those but when we do, it's highly likely that it's red crown rot because that's a very diagnostic structure that it produces.
Todd Gleason: 17:50Are they fairly large or are they like nitrogen nodules? How big are they really?
Carl Bradley: 17:57Yeah, great question. They're smaller than what you would see for nodules. So they'd be a lot smaller. Smaller than a BB, gosh, I can't think exactly on what to compare it to, but small little spherical structures, reddish orange. Yeah.
Carl Bradley: 18:14What other diseases might you look at this if you just looked and you said, well, there's
Todd Gleason: 18:20red near the surface of the soil along the stem, there are other diseases that look that way too, correct?
Carl Bradley: 18:26Yes, there are other disease, lots of diseases that cause those interveinal chlorosis symptoms besides SDS, like brown stem rot, southern stem canker. But you asked about the reddish discoloration. We see that with Rhizoctonia root rot as another disease where that can happen. And especially if you're seeing that early in the season during vegetative stages before we get to reproductive stages and would see other symptoms. That could be a really difficult one to kind of know which is which.
Carl Bradley: 18:55So sending samples off to your Land Grant University diagnostic lab here in Illinois, that would be the U of I plant clinic, is very important. That's one of the first steps in managing this disease is figuring out if that's what it is or what you have. Okay.
Todd Gleason: 19:09So that was my next set of questions. How do you start to manage the disease? Number one, send it off, make sure what you have and then what if it is confirmed?
Carl Bradley: 19:18Yeah. So within the season there's really nothing you can do. So if you have it, you've got it and you just have to, it's gonna be what it's gonna be. But the next time you plant soybeans in that field, there are a few seed treatments that have red crown rot on their label. We've been able to do some testing in Kentucky as well as working with U of I researchers in Illinois as well.
Carl Bradley: 19:40And we see that there's some products that have pretty good efficacy and nothing may be a silver bullet. You may still have some disease but certainly we see reduction in disease and we've been able to see a pretty good yield response with those as well.
Todd Gleason: 19:53Can you talk about those products and then are there resistance in development somewhere along the line for the seed itself?
Carl Bradley: 20:00Yeah, great question. Yeah, so you know the things that we've seen efficacy with in our trials have been Elivo, Saltro and a new product called Victrado. From our limited work with Victrado it looks like it's probably providing the greatest reduction in disease but we still need to kind of look at all these trials at a lot more locations as well. In regards to resistant varieties, seed companies are working on that and there are some differences right now in varieties. It's just that that information may be hard to get to at the moment.
Carl Bradley: 20:37It's not on seed catalogs or anything like that. So if you are dealing with red crown rot, I would work with the person that you're working with on purchasing your seed, see what kind of internal information that seed company may have. They may be able to maybe lead you away from any varieties that are super susceptible and maybe suggest a variety that might still be susceptible but maybe not as susceptible as something else. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Carl Bradley: 21:03You're welcome. Thank you.
Todd Gleason: 21:05That's Carl Bradley. He is a plant pathologist with the University of Kentucky. Made a presentation during the Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association meeting in Peoria. Donde is here now to take a look at the weather forecast. Thanks, Don, for taking some time with us.
Todd Gleason: 21:31What do you see for the coming week?
Don Day: 21:33Severe winter weather conditions will weather forecast and news headlines across a good chunk of The United States over the next week. We're gonna see multiple arctic waves spinning out of a polar vortex up in Hudson Bay that will send the cold air of the year across a lot of the nation. This is gonna cause dangerously cold wind chills and severe cold temperatures that will be a concern for livestock interest in the Upper Midwest. Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas could see air temperatures 20 to 30 degrees below zero or colder with wind chills in excess of 50 degrees below zero. This cold will go all the way to the Gulf Coast.
Don Day: 22:13A major winter storm with heavy snow and ice will occur in the Deep South from Texas through parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, into portions of Georgia and the Carolinas. A lot of the central and western areas of the Corn Belt, while severe cold will move in with single digits and subzero temperatures and below zero wind chills, snowfall amounts are not expected to be heavy. That'll be relegated to those southern areas of the country and along the East Coast as we're gonna see arctic waves coming through all the way through at least the next seven to ten days.
Todd Gleason: 22:51It's Don Day. He's with Day Weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Joined us on this Tuesday edition of the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason.