Mar 23 | Closing Market Report

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Todd Gleason: From the land grant university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market report. It is the 23rd day of March 2026. I'm Extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Curt Kimmel. He's from AgMarket.net out of Normal, Illinois. We'll hear from Rod Bain at USDA, where they're celebrating 100 years of USDA radio. He'll take us down a memory lane of sorts, and then we'll turn our attention to the weather forecast as we close out our time together. Mark Russo will join us from Everstream Analytics on this Monday edition of the closing market report that comes to you from Illinois Public Media. Find us online and listen to us on demand anytime you'd like at willag.org. Todd Gleason's services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.

May corn for the day settled at $4.59 1/2. That was 6 cents lower. July $4.70 1/2, down 5 1/2 cents, and December new crop down 4 1/4 cents at $4.86 1/2. May soybeans $11.63 1/2, up to 1/4. July $11.79, 2 1/2 higher, and November 5 1/2 higher at $11.46 1/2. The bean meal down $1.40 at $326.60. Bean oil $65.58, 7 cents higher. Wheat futures saw red in the July, down 7 1/4. That's the harvest month, $6.00 even the settlement price. The hard red July at $6.18 1/4, down 3 cents. Live cattle futures at $1.22 1/2 higher, finished $234.65. Feeder cattle at $348.35 per hundred pounds, $1.97 1/2 higher, and lean hogs 7 1/2 cents lower. They finished at $104.40. Crude oil for the day $87.49 a barrel, down $10.73. That's in the WTI. The Brent at $95.10, down $11.36. Wholesale price of gasoline at $2.90 4/10 of a cent, down 3 and 2/10 of a cent, and the diesel fuel or heating oil at $3.73 1/2 a gallon. That's just about 50 and 8/10 of a cent lower.

02:25 Ag Markets with Curt Kimmel
Todd Gleason: Now let's turn our attention directly to the marketplace. Curt Kimmel is here. He is with AgMarket.net. Hello Curt, thanks for being with us today.

Curt Kimmel: Glad to be here, Todd. What a roller coaster ride today.

Todd Gleason: I want to talk about the roller coaster ride, but can we set the tone with something that happened on Friday? The Cattle on Feed numbers were released by the United States Department of Agriculture. What did it tell us about the herd size in the United States?

Curt Kimmel: It is the monthly report. On feed, 99.8. The trade was looking for 99.3, so pretty well within trade expectations. Placements were a little higher than expected, 103.7. The trade was looking for 100.2. Then marketings, 93.2 versus 92.6 average trade guess. Placements a little higher, but overall numbers still remain relatively tight. Demand remains relatively good. Even with the outside markets jittery and stuff, the beef complex and even the pork complex held in there. When you look at the outside markets too, if you want to see some consumer confidence or investor confidence, in recording right now, the Dow is up over 900 points. Overall, it held in there quite well.

Over the weekend too, we did have another estimate. The AgMarket team put out their acreage estimates, Todd. The AgMarket team thinks corn acreage is going to be about 94.4 million acres versus the USDA outlook forum at 94. And of course, last year's corn acreage was 98.8. Soybean acreage, the team put together 86.1. The outlook forum was 85 million acres, and last year we had 81.2. These are subject to change. There was an old saying, "Buy land because they're not making it anymore," but the USDA found a different outlook on these last year's reports, Todd.

Todd Gleason: Let's talk about the marketplace and what happened over the weekend. The Trump administration talking about a 48-hour deadline and then has moved it back to five days related to bombing primary power supplies in Iran. That spooked the market a lot. However, it's been walked back and the market took that really well. It was a wide range though, 20 cents or thereabouts in the corn, 30 cents in the soybeans. Can you talk to me about this roller coaster you discussed earlier?

Curt Kimmel: Basically, in the thin volume, there was quite a bit of activity. Not to say any wrongdoing or anything, but there was quite a bit of activity before these tweets came out. Everybody, student body left, student body right, just created a lot of gyration. The risk was on that we're going to take some power grids out, and the war is not going to end anytime very soon. Then suddenly, word is things are going well with negotiations, we're going to give them some more time. AI or actual reports said there was really no communication. We're subject to headline news, we're subject to fake news. This is why you've got to have some type of covered position to have some staying power because we're going to get whipsawed.

As we mentioned at the outlook meeting there in Covington, volatility is just going to continue to increase in through here. You've got to have some price objectives to pick out ahead of time. But we did see some additional export business this morning. Mexico was in for 102,000 corn and 161,000 soybeans. With the higher prices we've seen here over the last month or two, export news seems fairly stout thus far. Freight cost has been high, exports are still hanging in there, and our export shipments are still running fairly good. We shipped out 1.7 million metric tons of corn, 1.1 million metric tons of beans, and 458,000 tons of wheat. Overall, the market held in there. Word of caution: if you look at that corn chart or crude oil chart, man, we had some pretty nasty reversals to the downside here.

Todd Gleason: There are two ag events taking place in Washington D.C. One of them should be the announcement of the RVOs, or the Renewable Volume Obligations. The other is a celebration of ag on Friday. What do you make of the two?

Curt Kimmel: RVOs have been an ongoing event. The bean oil market priced a lot of that in. It stalled out close to 70 cents. Got some fairly good support on pullbacks to 62, 63, but that's what the trade's been waiting for. Hopefully, we're not in a position here to sell the fact. Bean oil was trading about 49, 50 cents a pound as we came into 2026. We've had almost a 20-cent rally in through here. Hopefully, that will keep the market in focus to move forward on future demand.

Todd Gleason: Thank you much.

Curt Kimmel: You bet. Take care, Todd.

Todd Gleason: Curt Kimmel is with AgMarket.net.

08:14 Celebrating 100 Years of USDA Radio
Todd Gleason: Up next, we'll hear from the United States Department of Agriculture's radio service. Rod Bain has been putting together a story celebrating 100 years of radio from USDA. We've heard one of these stories already, and we'll continue throughout this centennial year for that service. Today, I'll interrupt the story from time to time as this is personal to me, and you'll hear why as we make our way through the program. Now, here's Rod Bain.

Rod Bain: Think about how much technology has changed over the last century. Mind-boggling. Light speed, particularly the last two decades. Those perhaps are some of your initial thoughts. Now in the context of advancing tech over the 100 years of USDA radio, former radio reporter and producer Gary Crawford tends to think...

Gary Crawford: Most people don't really care about how we do it, just so we do the job and they hear what they need to hear on the air.

Rod Bain: Yet as you listen to this program through your local radio station, or by streaming or download in some capacity, or perhaps use your smartphone to edit various forms of content for social media platforms, consider how USDA distributed radio programs when it first began its operations in 1926. Agriculture Department historian Wayne Connolly says for the popular Aunt Sammy programs, scripts were mailed out to radio stations nationwide to be voiced by local talent.

Wayne Connolly: So you'd have a radio announcer up in the Northeast, you had a Northeast accent. You'd send a script down to the South and you'd have someone reading the script doing the radio program in a Southern accent, so it's more relatable to the people in that area on the farm and so forth.

Rod Bain: As national radio networks were established, USDA radio staff provided live and recorded reports during nationally aired and syndicated programs. Former radio and TV service chief Lane Beatty recalled in a 1985 interview the distribution of shows like Agriculture USA via audio tape.

Lane Beatty: That became a syndicated program mailed out every week on tape. We added Agritape, a weekly tape service, about 4,000 reels of radio tape go out of that office every week to stations.

Rod Bain: The mediums used for feature program distribution progressed from cassette tapes, compact discs, to today's digital download and streaming.

Todd Gleason: I'll interrupt with a couple of notes here. First, WILL has been delivering agricultural programming since its very first broadcast in 1922. University of Illinois Extension, I think starting in about the 1960s, began delivering radio programming to stations across the state. That was done by reel-to-reel, as you've heard already from USDA. When I moved from WILL to Extension in 1994, that was my job, to produce the Illinois Farm Report. Five feature stories from the college each and every week, duplicated onto reel-to-reels and then distributed by the U.S. mail. I looked a bit like Santa Claus sometimes walking down the hall in Mumford with two full mailbags of those reel-to-reels each and every week.

Finally, those moved to distribution via MP3 file. However, at first, that distribution was really interesting because we were doing it by email. I worked with the RFD Network in Bloomington to begin that process in 1998, and more than once, actually many times on a Friday afternoon, we would crash the full email system at the Illinois Farm Bureau as we were trying to deliver an eight-minute-long MP3 file for them to use on the weekend. Now, here's Rod Bain again.

Rod Bain: In the case of USDA's radio newsline, some farm broadcasters such as DeLoss Jahnke and Rita Fraser of RFD Radio Network recall how stations used to receive stories via the phone lines.

DeLoss Jahnke / Rita Fraser: One of the overnight engineers' jobs was to call on the phone the USDA hotline. And so he would have a stack of carts fresh from USDA and you'd go through them and you'd hear, "Story one is the Ag Secretary..."

Todd Gleason: Oh, I remember making those phone calls when I was first working at WILL, even as a student from 1985 all the way through 1994. John Totten is a name that you may recall. He worked for Purdue producing radio from their ag programs, and there was a toll-free number to call them. There was also a satellite feed that we would pick up from the BBC with a program called The Farming World. You might recognize that phrase as I use it most days right here on Illinois Public Media's closing market report. It's Public Radio for the Farming World. Now back to Rod Bain and USDA.

Rod Bain: Speaking of Gary, having served 50 years with USDA radio, he experienced firsthand the rapid pace of advancing technologies in their equipment.

Gary Crawford: We started out with old, ancient reel-to-reel quarter-inch tape and went through the cassette era. Then we went to mini disc, which was a short-lived audio format, and then finally to digital recorders and flash drives.

Rod Bain: Laptop computers with audio editing software combined with digital recorders to make up today's field equipment, filing stories from anywhere. Record, edit, and distribute audio by smartphone. The tech is indeed there. But former USDA radio reporter and producer Brenda Curtiss recalls in several instances, much more was needed to record an event or file a report.

Brenda Curtiss: This big aluminum box... what I carried all the equipment in.

Todd Gleason: Oh, I had one of those. Still do. I call it my box of tricks.

Brenda Curtiss: I would say that that box, suitcase, whatever, was filled, would weigh between 25 and 30 pounds. That was your tape recorders, your tape, extra cords, because you never knew what situation you were going to come upon. Different microphones, different plugs, inputs, outputs, whatever. Weather coverage was at the Secretary's office at USDA headquarters, a farm property across the country, or an assignment Brenda was on phoning in reports from somewhere around the globe. I called the report in, fed him some tape, and then he would edit back here.

Todd Gleason: And Brenda probably fed those stories over a typical phone line you'd find at the time. A bit like spy movies where you see them take the handset and unscrew the bottom of it and use a couple of alligator clips in it. Well, that's part of the box of tricks. Our thanks go to Rod Bain for walking us down this memory lane. We'll bring you more of his stories in the future during this centennial year of USDA radio.

15:31 Ag Weather with Mark Russo
Todd Gleason: Let's take a look at the weather forecast for the growing regions across the planet. Mark Russo is here. He's with Everstream Analytics. Hi Mark, thanks for being with us.

Mark Russo: Hello there, Todd. Thanks for having me.

Todd Gleason: Let's begin in the United States. I'd like to work my way from the Southeast to the Northwest, across the Delta and the Midwest, and then out to the Plains states. Begin in those places that should be moving, or have been moving for some time now in the South, but start in the Southeast and make your way through the Delta.

Mark Russo: Across the Southeast right now, there's no concerns here for early fieldwork operations and planting, with soil moisture generally adequate, although a few areas have trended a little bit drier here recently, but that's not of a concern. It does look like some minor rain activity will work its way in here next week, and so that'll provide a nice little boost of soil moisture for newly planted crops. It's a similar situation across the Delta growing area right now. A few localized areas of dryness, but rainfall prospects do look to improve next week across the region. Also again, no sign of any real problematic weather here as we begin to kick off the new season.

The problem right now is, and has been recently, the Plains hard red winter wheat belt. Again, it's been very dry here during late winter, for some areas that dryness goes all the way back to the fall. Now with the record-setting heat that's built into the region, that has significantly drawn down soil moisture. That is the area that needs rain for crop development here to avoid any kind of real significant issues, and there is going to be an opportunity for rainfall coming up here. It's not this week across the Plains hard red winter wheat belt, it's actually next week. Right now that window does not look great, but we're beginning to see some indications of systems moving from the Rockies out into the Plains, and that will provide some opportunities for showers and thunderstorms. As it looks right now, we feel that the best rains will be more east, so central eastern Kansas, central eastern Oklahoma, so kind of outside of the biggest producing areas in the west, but still time will tell here and as we get closer we'll be able to hone in on those details. It's a good thing that there's at least a window of opportunity here versus the pattern here of late which has just been exceedingly dry and now unprecedented heat.

Todd Gleason: Now swing northward into Nebraska, which has had issues in the last week particularly with wildfires, and then turn your attention to the rest of the Corn Belt and maybe detail what's been happening in the Great Lakes area because there was an awful lot of snow last week, and I don't know how soon that will go away, or if it has already.

Mark Russo: First in Nebraska, with the pattern here coming up, still on the dry side, very warm, continued increased wildfire risk for much of this week. Next week though does provide some opportunities, more so eastern Nebraska versus western Nebraska, but again that will at least allow for some more favorable conditions there across the state. Across the Midwest and Great Lakes region, temperatures here have been quite variable, and at times that has boosted soil temperatures prior to planting, but some of the recent cool weather has again lowered things. As we go through this week and on into next week, at least we do see more warm days versus cooler days, so that's a favorable signal here heading towards the start of planting. Soil moistures are in very good shape following rain activity and some snow here in recent weeks.

Speaking of snow, for your question there Todd about the upper Midwest, you go back a week ago and they had the blizzard across those areas and high snow water equivalent, nothing crazy high but much higher than what they've seen over the course of the winter. That snow is gone. Rapidly melted as temperatures warmed up; in fact, in a place like Minneapolis they got up to 80 degrees here over the weekend, and so as a result of that there's basically no snow and very little snow water equivalent there across the upper Midwest region here. The less the snow water equivalent, then actually the reduced risk of any kind of major flooding or major delays in planting across that area heading into the start of the season.

Todd Gleason: And then speaking of planting, I want you to turn your attention to South America, where safrinha or second crop corn is in the midst of being planted and of course harvest is happening as well for soybeans, both in Mato Grosso and parts of Brazil, but then work your way towards Argentina.

Mark Russo: Right now in Brazil, the main item that we're watching, this is not of any big concern right now, but the southern safrinha corn belt in around Parana has trended drier here recently, and that dryness does look to continue over the next couple of weeks. Rainfall looks to be more concentrated up north across the northern safrinha belt and center-west and northeast Brazil in general. But for that area around Parana, not only will it be drier than normal, but also warmer than normal as well. So that will allow more of the crop to be planted here during this later stage of the planting window, but it does put a little more emphasis on some rains returning here prior to the end of the rainy season there. So that's one thing that we're watching. At this time we're not expecting the dryness to persist throughout all of April and we feel that rainfall prospects will begin to increase again across the region mid to late month.

Outside of that, pretty quiet across Brazil and for that matter Argentina. For late developing soybeans in far southern Brazil and Argentina, they got a great drink of water over the weekend. In fact, Buenos Aires, Argentina, which had been one of the kind of the lone dry pockets in Argentina, saw a widespread rain event over the weekend, helping to boost soil moisture. Looking ahead here, more rains on the way, not as much this week, but next week rains look to return, especially to Buenos Aires again, and for late developing soybeans that's quite favorable. Could result in a few minor disruptions in corn and sunflower and very early soybean harvesting there, but all in all we don't see any major issues right now.

Todd Gleason: Thank you much Mark. I appreciate it.

Mark Russo: You're welcome Todd.

Todd Gleason: That's Mark Russo. He is with Everstream Analytics, joining us on this Monday edition of 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. Our theme music is written, performed, produced, and courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason. You have a good afternoon. I'm Extension's Todd Gleason.