Mar 23 | Closing Market Report

Todd Gleason: 00:00

From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois. This is the Closing Market Report. It is the March 2026. I'm extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Kurt Kimmel.

Todd Gleason: 00:13

He's from agmarket.net out of Normal, Illinois. We'll hear from Rod Bain at USDA where they're celebrating one hundred 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 Everestream Analytics on this Monday edition of the Closing Market Report that comes to you from Illinois Public Media. Find us online.

Todd Gleason: 00:42

Listen to us on demand anytime you'd like at willag.org. That's willag.org.

announce: 00:51

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

Todd Gleason: 00:56

May corn for the day settled at $4.59 and a half. That was 6¢ lower. July April down 5 and a half cents. And December new crop down 4 and a quarter cents at $4.86 and a half. May soybeans, $11.63 and a half up two and a quarter.

Todd Gleason: 01:12

July, $11.79, two and a half higher. In November, five and a half higher at $11.46 and a half. The bean meal, down a dollar 40 at $3.26 60. Bean oil, $65.58, 7¢ higher. Wheat futures, soft red in the July, down seven and a quarter.

Todd Gleason: 01:29

That's the harvest month, $6 even the settlement price, the hard red July at $6.18 and a quarter, down 3¢. Live cattle futures at a dollar 22 and a half higher finished $2.35 or rather $2.34 65. Feeder cattle at $348.35 per 100 pounds, a dollar 97 and a half higher. And lean hogs, 7 and a half cents lower. They finished at a $104.40.

Todd Gleason: 01:56

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 and 4 tenths of a cent, down 3 and 2 tenths of a cent, and the diesel fuel or heating oil at $3.73 and a half cents a gallon. That's just about 50 and 8 tenths of a cent lower. Now let's turn our attention directly to the marketplace.

Todd Gleason: 02:28

Kurt Kimmel is here. He is with agmarket.net. Hello, Kurt. Thanks for being with us today.

Curt Kimmel: 02:34

I'm glad to be here, Todd. What a roller coaster ride today.

Todd Gleason: 02:39

I wanna 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: 02:54

Yeah, it's a monthly report on feed 99.8, the traders were looking for 99.3, so pretty well within trade expectations. Placement's a little higher than expected, 103.7, the trade was looking for 100.2. Then marketing's 93.2 versus 92.6 of the average trade gas. Placement's a little higher, but overall numbers still remain relatively tight, demand remains relatively good, so even the outside markets kind of jittering stuff, the beef complex, even the pork complex held in there. But when you look at the outside markets too, if you want to see some consumer confidence or investor confidence, the recording right now, the Dow is up over 900 points.

Curt Kimmel: 03:46

So overall, overall held in there quite well. The two over the weekend too, we did have another estimates here, the Ag market team put out their acreage estimates Todd. The Ag market team thinks corn acreage is going to be about 94,400,000 acres versus USDA outlook form in 94 and of course last year's corn acres was 98.8. Soybean acreage, the team put together 86.1, outlook forms 85,000,000 acres, and last year we had 81.2. But these are subject to change.

Curt Kimmel: 04:24

There is an old saying buy land because they're not making it anymore, but USDA has had a different outlook on the last few reports.

Todd Gleason: 04:32

Let's talk about the marketplace and what happened. Over the weekend, the Trump administration talking about a forty eight hour deadline and then has moved it back to five days related to bombing primary power supplies in Iran. That spooked the market pretty lot. However, it's been backed away, the market took that really well. It was a wide range, though.

Todd Gleason: 05:02

I had 20¢ or thereabouts in the corn, 30¢ in the soybeans. Can you talk to me about this roller coaster you discussed earlier?

Curt Kimmel: 05:09

Yeah. Yeah. Basic 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. And so, know, everybody, student body left, student body right, created a lot of gyration.

Curt Kimmel: 05:33

But yeah, the risk was on that we're gonna take some power grids out and the war's not going to end any time very soon, then all of a sudden word is, well things are going well, negotiation was going to give him some more time that I ran, as far as AI or actual reports, said there was really no communication. So we're subject to headline news, we're subject to fake news, and 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. And as we mentioned at the outlook meeting, they're coming to the beef house, volatility is just going to continue to increase in through here, so you gotta have some price objectives to pick out ahead of time. But we did see some additional export business this morning, Mexico was in for 103,000 corn and 161,000 soybeans so 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 still hanging in there and our export and shipments still running fairly good, we shipped out 1,700,000 metric tons of corn, 1,100,000 metric tons of beans and 458,000 tons of wheat.

Curt Kimmel: 06:58

So overall, market held in there. Word of caution, if you look at that corn chart or crude oil chart, man, we had some pretty nasty reverses to the downside here.

Todd Gleason: 07:09

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: 07:23

Boy, it's been RVO has been an ongoing event. The bean oil markets priced a lot of that in. It's stalled out close to 70¢. It's got some fairly good support on pullbacks at 62, 63. But that's what the trade's been waiting for.

Curt Kimmel: 07:40

Hopefully we've not been in a position here to sell the fact. Bean oil was trading about $49.50 cents a pound as we came into 2026. And so we've had almost a 20¢ rallying through here, and hopefully that will keep the market in focus here to move forward on on future demand.

Todd Gleason: 08:04

Thank you much.

Curt Kimmel: 08:05

Very good. Take care, Todd.

Todd Gleason: 08:07

You too. Kurt Kimmel is with agmarket.net. Up next, we'll hear from the United States Department of Agriculture's radio service. Rod Bain has been putting together a story celebrating one hundred years of radio from USDA. We've heard one of these stories already and will continue throughout this centennial year for that service.

Todd Gleason: 08:33

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.

Rod Bain: 08:44

Now here's Rod Bain. 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.

Rod Bain: 08:58

Now in the context of advancing tech over the one hundred years of USDA radio, former radio reporter producer Gary Crawford tends to think

Gary Crawford: 09:08

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: 09:13

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: 09:43

So you'd have a radio announcer up in the Northeast who had a Northeast accent. You'd send another script down to the South and you 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: 09:57

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 distribution of shows like Agriculture USA via audio tape.

Lane Beatty: 10:16

That became a syndicated program. They go 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: 10:27

The mediums used for feature program distribution progressed. Think cassette tapes, compact disc, to today, digital download and streaming.

Todd Gleason: 10:36

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 nineteen sixties, began delivering radio programming to stations across the state. That was done by Real to Real, as you've heard already from USDA. And when I moved from WILL to extension in 1994, that was my job to produce the Illini Farm Report, five feature stories from the college each and every week, duplicated on the real to real and then distributed by The US mail.

Todd Gleason: 11:17

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. And then finally, those moved to distribution via m p three 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 m p three file for them to use on the weekend.

Todd Gleason: 12:04

Now here's Rod Bain again.

Rod Bain: 12:06

In the case of USDA's radio news broadcasters such as the Deloss Janhnke and Rita Fraser of RFD Radio Network recall how stations used to receive stories via the phone lines.

DeLoss Jahnke: 12:19

One of the overnight engineers' jobs was to call on the phone the USDA number. And so he would have a stack of carts fresh from USDA, and you'd go through them, and you'd take them once you want.

Rita Fraser: 12:30

Story one is the ag secretary.

DeLoss Jahnke: 12:33

They were all a minute or less. Gary Crawford, US Department Of Agriculture, Washington.

Todd Gleason: 12:37

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's 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.

Todd Gleason: 13:13

It's public radio for the farming world. Now back to Rod Bain and USDA. Speaking of

Rod Bain: 13:19

Gary, having served fifty years with USDA Radio, he experienced firsthand the rapid pace of advancing technologies in their equipment.

Gary Crawford: 13:28

We started out with old ancient reel to reel quarter inch tape

Todd Gleason: 13:33

Used them.

Gary Crawford: 13:33

And went through the cassette era. Then we went to mini disc.

Rod Bain: 13:38

Skip that one.

Gary Crawford: 13:39

Which was a short lived audio format. And then finally to digital recorders and flash drives.

Todd Gleason: 13:45

OCD in the middle of that.

Rod Bain: 13:47

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 producer Brenda Curtis recalls in several instances much more was needed to record an event or file a report.

Brenda Curtis: 14:09

This big aluminum box, what I carried all the equipment in.

Todd Gleason: 14:12

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

Brenda Curtis: 14:16

I would say that that box, suitcase, when it was filled, would weigh between twenty five and thirty 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.

Rod Bain: 14:31

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.

Brenda Curtis: 14:43

I called the report in, fed him some tape, and then he would head it back here.

Todd Gleason: 14:48

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. Well, my thanks go to Rod for doing that. We'll bring you more of his stories in the future during the centennial year of USDA radio.

Todd Gleason: 15:30

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: 15:39

Hello there, Todd. Thanks for having me.

Todd Gleason: 15:41

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: 16:04

Sure. Yeah. Across the Southeast, right now, there's no concerns here for early field work 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. And then 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.

Mark Russo: 16:32

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, and, 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.

Mark Russo: 17:07

And now with the record setting heat that's built into the region, that has significantly drawn down soil moisture. And so that is the area that needs rain for crop development here to avoid any kind of real significant issues. And there is gonna 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.

Mark Russo: 17:36

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 kinda outside of the biggest producing areas in the West. But still time will tell here, and as we get closer, be able to hone in on those details. But, again, 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, you know, exceedingly dry and now, you know, unprecedented heat.

Todd Gleason: 18:17

Down 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. I don't know how soon that'll go away or if it has already.

Mark Russo: 18:36

Yeah. First in Nebraska with the 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. And then 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.

Mark Russo: 19:20

And so 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, and again soil moisture is in very good shape following rain activity and some snow here in recent weeks. And speaking of snow, for your question there Todd about the Upper Midwest, and 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 was gone, rapidly melted as temperatures warmed up.

Mark Russo: 20:01

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. So which again, less the snow water equivalent, then actually the reduced risk of any kind of major flooding or major delays in planting across that area, kind of heading into the start of the season.

Todd Gleason: 20:36

And then speaking of planting, I want 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, those both in Mato Grosso and parts of Brazil, but then work your way towards Argentina.

Mark Russo: 20:52

Yeah. Right now in Brazil, the main item that we're watching, this is not of any big concern right now, the Southern Safrinha Corn Belt in and 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 Central 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, you know, prior to the end of the rainy season there.

Mark Russo: 21:37

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, yeah, 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 kind of the lone dry pocket in Argentina, they saw a widespread rain event over the weekend helping to boost soil moisture.

Mark Russo: 22:15

And looking ahead here, more rain's on the way. Not as much this week, but next week rains look to return, especially to Buenos Aires again. For late developing soybeans, that's quite favorable. It could result in a few minor disruptions in corn and and sunflower and, you know, very early soybean harvesting there. But all in all, we don't see any major issues right now.

Todd Gleason: 22:39

Thank you much, Mark. I appreciate it. You're welcome, Todd. That's Mark Russo. He is with Aberstream Analytics, joined us on this Monday edition of the Closing Market Report that came to you from Illinois Public Media.

Todd Gleason: 22:51

It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at wilag.org, willag.org. Our theme music is written, performed, produced in courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason. You have a good afternoon. I'm extension's Todd Gleason.