Jun 26 | Closing Market Report

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The June 26, 2026, broadcast of the Closing Market Report, hosted by Todd Gleason from the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, features expert analysis on agricultural commodities and weather forecasting. In the markets segment, Mike Zuzolo of GlobalCommResearch highlights the potential market impact of the upcoming USDA crop acreage and grain stocks reports. Zuzolo notes that commodity prices are currently driven more by macroeconomic factors—such as a strong US dollar, currency devaluations in Russia and Japan, and crude oil trends—than by agricultural supply-and-demand fundamentals. He cautions that unless these fundamental reports shift investor focus and establish market lows by early July, producers will need to adopt more defensive market strategies.

During the weather segment, Eric Snodgrass of Nutrien Ag Solutions reviews a highly active June characterized by heavy rainfall and a record number of tornadoes across Illinois, which effectively eliminated local drought conditions but heightened the risk of crop disease. Looking ahead, Snodgrass forecasts a significant heat wave persisting through mid-July, caused by a stationary atmospheric wave that will keep both daytime and overnight temperatures high. Fortunately, excessive soil moisture will help mitigate heat stress on local crops by generating hyper-local, cooling thunderstorms, though Snodgrass warns that the stationary ridge poses a severe, immediate drought risk for states situated closer to its epicenter, such as Missouri and Kansas.

01:34 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzlo, GlobalCommResearch
10:53 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, NutrienAgSolutions

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Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 26th day of June, 2026. I’m extension’s Todd Gleason. Coming up, we’ll talk about the commodity markets with Mike Zuzolo. He’s at globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, and then we’ll turn our attention to the weather forecast. We’ll do that with Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible. If you can stay with us for the whole of the hour, you’ll hear all of our commodity week program, including our panelists Arlan Suderman, Curt Kimmel, and Greg Johnson. If not, it’s up online right now in its entirety at willag.org, and many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend.

announce: Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.

Todd Gleason: July corn at $4.12 and three-quarters, two lower for the day. December at $4.41 and a half, a penny and a half lower. July beans down one and a quarter, $11.26 and a quarter the settlement price, and November soybeans $11.56 and a quarter, three-quarters of a cent lower. Bean meal futures down $1.20, the bean oil 49 cents higher. Wheat futures soft red in the July contract 12 and three-quarters lower, finished at $5.78 and a quarter, and the hard red July at $6.11, down nine and a half cents. Live cattle futures $1.40 lower for the day. Feeder cattle off $3.45, and lean hogs down just two and a half cents on the afternoon. Crude oil down $2.65 a barrel.

01:34 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, GlobalCommResearch

Todd Gleason: Mike Zuzolo, globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hi Mike, thanks for joining us again on a Friday.

Mike Zuzolo: Great to be with you. Happy Friday, Todd.

Todd Gleason: Happy Friday to you as well. A little rainfall here, cool for us today. We’re supposed to get hot, humid next week. Have you started to go that way in your part of the world just yet?

Mike Zuzolo: Yeah, the humidity is coming up. We too have been under some rain showers, and the World Cup match was a little bit soggy on Thursday night, and that’s about an hour south of us in Kansas City. So we’ve had some good rains. You know, a lot of people that I’ve talked to on both sides of the Corn Belt actually would welcome some warmer, drier weather at this point, unless you were in Nebraska and had gotten missed most of May and early June. But even southeast Nebraska and really the eastern half of Nebraska, that area would love to see a little bit more of a hotter, drier bias to give that corn a chance to green up and get a little bit bigger.

Todd Gleason: I have to ask a question about the soccer matches or football, because Arlan Suderman was on yesterday for Commodity Week. Those who can stay with us for the whole hour will hear all of that program. And I did ask Arlan because he’s in Kansas City if he had gone to—I didn’t think matches because those are really, those are expensive tickets, but I wondered whether he had gone into any of the bars just to be there to watch. Have you taken any of that in at all?

Mike Zuzolo: No, I sure haven’t. But it’s interesting you ask because on June 10th we went down to the Tallgrass Prairie, and I wanted to see the big cattle ranch down there from the Jones family that surrounds the Tallgrass Prairie, which is a national preserve. And we were looking at the bison, and five guys from Argentina came up behind us and we started talking with them. So it got pretty funny pretty fast.

Todd Gleason: Well, that is fantastic that sport can draw us all together. It really can. Okay, so back to the matter at hand, the marketplace. It’s been an interesting week. Next week we have USDA’s crop acreage and grain stocks report. Both of them could throw a wrench into the market, either for the good or the bad, either one. What are you thinking?

Mike Zuzolo: Well, I think this is where, between the delivery on Monday for July futures, the acreage report, the stocks report, the European weather, the United States weather, we should have a pretty good handle on supply-demand fundamentals. And I want to see whether that turns the heads of the investment community, because I feel very strongly with the European corn price at a $2.50 premium in Paris, France versus the CME in Chicago, that this market has still been driven by the funds and not the fundamentals. And the fundamentals that it’s been driven by has been the macro fundamentals of the currencies, the yen at near a 40-year low, not the fact that the US crude oil inventories this week showed that we’re at the lowest in 41 years, since the mid–1980s.

One of the things that really stood out to me on Friday especially, and earlier this week with the wheat market, Todd, was not only the heat that we were seeing in Europe and talk of losing a lot of crop, and potentially a third of the corn crop based upon the Ag Ministry, but in the wheat specifically, we did not see that translate into a Friday rally after Thursday’s move up. And I think a lot of the reason was because the Russian ruble had lost seven and a half percent this week against the dollar, and that was directly related to lifting the Iran oil sanctions and also directly related to, I think, the Ukrainians being so effective in taking out the Russian oil deep in their country. And so the ruble’s really been under attack by the speculators, and I think it’s translated into a weaker grain market. But that’s kind of where I’m at with the clients right now, is that if I’m right about the funds versus the fundamentals, this next 10 days is going to give me enough supply-demand fundamentals that I hope it turns the heads of the investors, and if it does, they should want to short cover, I think.

Todd Gleason: Are you worried in the wheat market? We’ve had five of the last six days have been lower. Thursday, as you mentioned, was the higher day in that, and we’re only what, eight cents or something like that above the contract low for the July soft red winter wheat going into expiration. How worried are you about that marketplace?

Mike Zuzolo: Well, that’s exactly where I’m at. I mean, the wheat and the crude was the major linkage to lead us higher until May 15th. As I see it, that US-China trade disappointment initiated the top, but it didn’t explain why we went down and why we’re a 100% retracement now and filling gaps in the weekly corn chart this week, and about 70 cents away from filling the gap in the WTI from when we initially launched. That, I think, was more due to the US dollar. The Federal Reserve Chairman, the Secretary of Treasury going after an increase in dollar invoicing and really wanting a stronger dollar in some of his comments this past week or two. This is the issue that I have to face, is if we don’t have a bad crop here in the United States, I can’t rely upon global El Niño to give us higher prices in the July time period. So that’s really the issue, is that if the crude and the wheat don’t make the lows by the time we get to like the 10th of July, then I’m going to have to get a lot more defensive with what I do.

Todd Gleason: If they do make the lows, and I’m thinking about both corn and wheat because on both of those they have made contract highs in May, contract lows in the month of June. If we make, I guess, a new low or a low of some sort in wheat, how much upside potential does it have?

Mike Zuzolo: I think that the stocks numbers, because the world stocks-to-use and the US stocks-to-use in both wheat and corn are lower than they were a year ago, I would say a model year that I’m looking at—and this goes to corn with the wheat supporting because the corn has been attached to the hip of the wheat for the most of 2026—but the 2010 year time period is the model year I’m looking at, Todd, where we made a low at the end of June when we had the grain stocks and acreage numbers update. And this would be especially if we gained some bean acres and lost some corn acres next week. But we essentially went from a low of about, you know, $3.50 in December corn at the end of June all the way up to about $5.50, $5.70 by the time we got to the early part of November. It was a very strong turn to the upside, and that would be directly contrary to what we’ve witnessed where we’ve been trading almost identically to the last two years where we didn’t make a low in December corn until the early part of August and then had a retracement. That 2010 market would be a true trend reversal and complete move higher. But again, that would be in that early July time period.

Todd Gleason: What would precipitate that? A lack of precipitation, I suppose, is one of the things, but…

Mike Zuzolo: Well, yeah, this is where it really does have to be, in my mind, if my analysis is right, it’s got to be wheat, it’s got to be crude, and therefore it’s got to be the dollar. You know, this is where the dollar has gone to a 13-month high out of nowhere essentially. And that’s really the key to why we’re where we’re at right now, if you ask me, especially given the type of—I mean, we’re talking about 111, 112 degree temperatures in Europe this week, and the wheat’s not going to even close higher on the week on that. So it would have to be, to me, to be able to make that kind of a shift, have to be the dollar and the crude oil and the wheat doing that kind of a move to make that corn change like that.

Todd Gleason: What would cause the dollar to weaken?

Mike Zuzolo: I think the resumption of the Trump administration and the resumption of the Iran conflict. I mean, we’ve seen a seven-month low in gold, that’s been directly related to the strength in the dollar, and we’ve seen this break apart of the crude oil and the dollar that they’re moving opposite one another like they used to do traditionally up until we became a big exporter. So I think you unwind, or essentially the funds reload what they did back in the springtime as far as strong crude oil, strong wheat, weaker dollar.

Todd Gleason: So something happens in the Middle East, maybe Ukraine, that it really ignites war someplace then?

Mike Zuzolo: Yeah, we just don’t know. It’s like I’m almost ready to go to compliance and say, can we change commodity futures involves risk of loss to risk of sanity? I mean, you don’t know what it’s going to be, what exactly it is going to be. You just watch for those types of trends to develop, led by some of these key factors.

Todd Gleason: Mike, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Mike Zuzolo: Great to be with you, Todd. Thanks for having me, buddy. Have a good weekend.

Todd Gleason: You too. That is Mike Zuzolo. He’s at globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas.

10:53 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, NutrienAgSolutions

Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention now to the weather across the Corn Belt. Eric Snodgrass is here. He is with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible. Another rainy day, kind of cool as well. We’ll talk more about the heat that’s coming next week, but I do want to discuss the month of June with you, Eric, as we wrap it up. It seemed as if it was not too terribly bad. How did the stats round out?

Eric Snodgrass: Well, I mean, some places have picked up several inches of rain. There’s a spot north of Galesburg that’s grabbed a foot of rain. We’ve got places across the central and northern part of the state that just saw a tremendous amount of moisture. And as a result, we’ve been knocked off the drought monitor. We’ve now got in places excess, you know, flooding. It’s been very problematic for a lot of different locations. But I think before I get into maybe some of the impacts of that, we’ve got to talk about the severe weather aspect of this, because right now Illinois leads the country. We’ve had nearly 200 reports of tornadoes. I think we’re almost like four times what Texas has seen so far this year. And so this has been an incredibly active, incredibly active spring.

And this brings up some important research. I’ve been sharing this research result since gosh, the year 2021, I think. And it was research done by Victor Gensini, who’s up at Northern Illinois University, and Jeff Trapp at the University of Illinois has been doing research on basically Tornado Alleys shifting and moving. And they’ve complemented the work of Harold Brooks. All three of which are Illinois folks, and what they found is that, yeah, Tornado Alley is shifting, you know, to the east over time. And so it’s not uncommon for us to have these severe weather events. But my goodness, has the severe weather been bad in the state.

Now, other impact, the rain. Been looking at some of the potential disease pressure out of all this rain. And because it’s not only wet here but much wetter to our south, we are looking at possibly a very high year in terms of—I guess I’d say a more vulnerable year for high disease pressure as we go into the month of July simply because of the way things have shaped up to our south, allowing certain fungus and bacteria and all sorts of different things to kind of thrive. And they’re getting pushed farther to the north with time. So Todd, there’s a whole host of things that June did. And the one thing it didn’t do was keep drought around here. Kept the drought way over in parts of Iowa. That’s where we’re worried right now about places being too dry.

Todd Gleason: I know where I am worried. It is a bit about next week because of the heat. Of course, all of the rain moisture in the ground across much of the Corn Belt has been very helpful and will be very helpful as we head into 90-degree days. It’s the overnight lows that seem like they could be an issue though.

Eric Snodgrass: Yes, I’m so glad you brought that up, because during the day when the sun is just pounding on the ground, if you’ve got soil moisture and you’ve got moisture in the crop, 50% of the sun’s energy will be used to evaporate that. The other 50% being used to heat things. So in other words, had we been talking about June drought up to this point, then this heat wave that’s coming through would have been exponentially worse in terms of the crop conditions.

Now, the way we see this though, is it’s got a really cool historical story to what’s going on. So I’m gonna tell it to you real quick, alright? If you were to ever have taken courses with me at the University of Illinois, you would have learned about a man named Carl-Gustaf Rossby. So he is one of the founding fathers of understanding how atmospheric dynamics work, and what he taught us is that the jet stream moves in waves. Now, we all know this now, because we can see it. Like we have computer models and you can see it on the nightly news, and you and I talk about it, Andrew talks about it. It’s a common thing. But back then, when he discovered this, we didn’t understand that. And he found a very specific number. Okay, so here it is. If the wave between a ridge crest and another ridge crest is about, I don’t know, about 4,500 kilometers, the wave tends to balance its forward speed with the advection of planetary vorticity. And most people listening right now are going, what just happened on this little radio interview, where are we going? Okay, all that means is the wave doesn’t move. It’s like a standing wave. So Todd, here it is. That means we’re going to keep the heat around here for at least halfway through the month of July, and that could be problematic because the overnight lows are going to be high with this as well, well into the low to mid–70s.

Todd Gleason: Okay, so if it’s standing still, it’s just going to stay put. Do we see a time where it moves?

Eric Snodgrass: Well, the thing about a standing wave, Todd, and especially where we are, we could end up seeing a lot of what we call ridge-riding thunderstorms. So it’s going to be hot, but we could, with all the excess moisture in the ground, be able to kick off daily convective events and storm on the crop. But it’s not widespread rain. It’s hyper-local squall lines that come through and deliver storms. And those folks that get them, they cool down, they get the moisture, the crop does better. I’m mostly worried, honestly, about Missouri, Kansas, parts of Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma. That is the region where the epicenter of this ridge could stand, and as a result, that could go over really hot and really dry very, very quickly.

Todd Gleason: Okay, so in some years in the past, we have always talked about this as an oscillation, and kind of this standing high, but it moves a little bit from maybe the Four Corners to the west, and we get hot, or we have the ridge-riders, and then it moves back. Is that the same function we’re talking about?

Eric Snodgrass: It’s the same thing. I just need it… it’s going to be, maybe it’s going to be closer to Missouri than it is going to be to the Four Corners. What we want, I mean to be honest with you, is we want it to elongate and, as you said, stretch to the Four Corners. Now of course nobody in the Four Corners wants that, but it works out better for us in terms of getting those storms. So it’s a… the forecast is a bit fragile right now, Todd, and I think it’s going to be important to see how long the water we have in the soil is going to last as a reserve going into a heat wave that’s going to take us well past the 4th of July. I think the big call will be on the 9th, 10th, or 11th of the month, does the wave still stand in the same place it’s developing here in the near term.

Todd Gleason: So not next week, but the following one then.

Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, that’s it.

Todd Gleason: Alright. Hey, thanks much. I appreciate it.

Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, you bet.

Todd Gleason: That’s Eric Snodgrass. He is with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible, and helped us to wrap up this Friday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online on-demand anytime you’d like to listen at willag.org.