Mar 24 | Closing Market Report

cmr260324

Todd Gleason: From the land grant university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market report for the 24th day of March 2026. I'm Extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Naomi Blohm. She's at totalfarmmarketing.com. We'll turn our attention to ForgeBee, a brand new entrepreneurial startup located in Research Park here on campus and dedicated to helping pollinators feed the planet. Then, we'll turn our attention to the weather forecast. We'll talk with Don Day as we wrap up our time together. He's at DayWeather in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on this Tuesday edition of the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. Our theme music is written, performed, produced, and courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason. Todd Gleason's services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.

May corn for the day settled at $4.62 1/2, 3 cents higher. July at $4.72 1/2, up 2 cents. December corn was 2 1/2 higher today, finishing at $4.89. May soybeans $11.55, down 8 1/2 cents. July $11.71 1/2, 7 1/2 lower. November beans at $11.43 3/4. That's a bushel, down 2 3/4 for the new crop. Bean meal was $4.20 lower. Bean oil was up 15 cents. Soft red winter wheat in the July at $6.02, up 2 cents for the day. The hard red July, the harvest month there, at $6.19 3/4. It finished a penny and a half higher on this Tuesday afternoon.

01:41 Ag Markets with Naomi Blohm
Todd Gleason: Naomi Blohm from Total Farm Marketing now joins us to take a look at what's been happening in the world of commodity markets. Hi, Naomi. It looks like it was kind of a quiet day in trade. That's new actually, but it was really pretty quiet.

Naomi Blohm: Yeah, absolutely. Taking cues from outside markets having a relatively quiet day, in crude oil there was about a $5 trading range. Corn had about a 6-cent range today, beans had about a 13-cent range, and the wheat market had about a 15-cent range overall. So, not too much fresh news today; we're regurgitating old news. I think we're seeing some position squaring ahead of two things coming up. There's hope that later this week we will maybe get some news on the RVO and SRE clarity at the White House event on Friday, but they said it might take until the end of March, so we're waiting for that. And then, of course, waiting for the acreage report on March 31st.

Todd Gleason: That would be next Tuesday. Let's start with the RVOs, or the Renewable Volume Obligations, and the SRE, the small refinery exemptions. What is the trade hoping for, so that we have some kind of idea when those are announced, what direction the marketplace might head?

Naomi Blohm: I'll be honest, I'm not totally sure, but I'm thinking that we just want clarity as far as whether we are going to have a number and stick with it, or if they are going to have wiggle room to kick the can down the road, which feels like what has happened in the past. We're looking for concrete numbers, and they've hinted that we're actually going to see some concrete numbers. But what that will be is the question. That is going to affect future demand, and it could set us up for new demand for the future, or it could just be a continuation of current demand with slight increases in the short term. I guess my thought is they'll do something concrete, but more of a baby step. I don't think we're getting anything over the top exciting.

Todd Gleason: So that would either be by Friday, which is the celebration of agriculture and the 250th anniversary of the United States taking place on the White House lawn, or on Tuesday of next week at 11:00 AM Central Time when the USDA will release the prospective plantings report and the quarterly grain stocks number. Let's start with the prospective plantings report. We'll use the USDA numbers to begin with. They were 94 million acres for corn and 85 million acres for soybeans. Where do you think the trade is at today, or maybe better, where is Total Farm Marketing putting their numbers?

Naomi Blohm: With that corn acre number, of course, last year we were at 98.8 million. I'm thinking it's probably going to be closer to 95 million personally. I do think we'll see the shift lower. But from what I've talked about with producers, for the most part, they have some of their anhydrous put down, they're feeling confident with fertilizer, and they've recognized the prices that we've had recently with December corn getting up near the $5 handle, so they are comfortable with some of that. I do think corn will be down to 95 million, maybe not that 94 million number the USDA was talking about.

On the soybean side, last year we were at 81.2 million. I would guess that we'll see about a 3 million acre increase, taking it up to about 84 million. That's where my thoughts are. I'm really curious to see what happens with cotton acres in the South. I'm curious to see some of the smaller grains, like barley, oats, and sorghum. For instance, in portions of the Dakotas where the soybean basis has not been attractive, do they go back to some of those non-traditional crops like barley or spring wheat? And in the South, with cotton prices not being overly attractive, do they plant milo? There could be a lot of little surprises. Usually, the March 31st report does have some sort of surprise, and we can see some market price response in either direction.

Todd Gleason: Now turn your attention to that grain stocks number, Naomi. Sometimes ag economists say the middle two grain stocks, or the second and third quarter figures, can be really wonky. What are you expecting out of it?

Naomi Blohm: Well, I think my curiosity is with corn and wheat. With our exports being so strong, are the quarterly grain stocks going to be a little bit lower than expected, which could be supportive for prices? And then, of course, I am very curious about soybeans, where we've had such strong crush demand but very modest export demand. What does that look like in terms of the quarterly stocks? Those are two big aspects of the March 31st reports, and both need to be looked at closely, as they set the new cornerstone for price activity for the second quarter.

Todd Gleason: Okay, thanks much. We'll talk with you again next week.

Naomi Blohm: Thank you.

Todd Gleason: That's Naomi Blohm. She is with totalfarmmarketing.com.

07:18 ForgeBee.com Startup Pollinator Company
Todd Gleason: Today we're going to explore a different kind of agricultural company. It's called ForgeBee. It has developed a system to allow the manufacture of single-use units of highly efficient honeybees for pollination in place of full-sized colonies. Its founders say this is more cost-effective and resource-efficient than the current model. We'll explore why that's the case in a moment, but first, we need to talk about where this new company is coming into being: EnterpriseWorks. EnterpriseWorks is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's technology business incubator, located in Research Park, supporting science-based startups that are commercializing disruptive technologies. It's a building, but more. EnterpriseWorks provides resources to students, faculty, and community entrepreneurs, including laboratory and office spaces, mentorship, and assistance with grant opportunities.

We've talked with Gene Robinson a couple of times over the years. He's a professor here on campus, and among other titles, is the director of the Bee Research Facility. We know from him that over the past 25 years, populations of honeybees across the country have been declining. There are issues with disease, pesticides, parasitic mites, and even poor nutrition. All of these, he says, are weakening bees. This is a problem for crops which need to be pollinated by honeybees. So Gene Robinson and his colleague, a former student turned CEO, Adam Hamilton, have developed a solution, and EnterpriseWorks is helping them create a company around it. Here's Gene.

Gene Robinson: Yes, so we are developing a way to rear honeybees in the laboratory so that they are free of disease and free of parasites, so they have a better chance to do a good job of pollinating out in the field.

Todd Gleason: So Adam, you have this company called ForgeBee that does this process. How important has the Enterprise Center—the building that houses entrepreneurial companies like yours on campus—been to its beginning success rate?

Adam Hamilton: As the name suggests, the incubator is there to help the company grow. We started off very small. I was the first and only employee for almost a year. Without EnterpriseWorks there, I think we would have really stumbled as we were taking those first steps from academia into the business world. Whenever we got hung up on anything, EnterpriseWorks, the staff there, and the mentors through the Entrepreneur in Residence program were there to keep us from falling down when we were trying to address problems that, coming from academia, we'd never faced before. That was really critical for our early success.

Todd Gleason: Things like what? What's a single example you can come up with where you just ran into a wall and they helped?

Adam Hamilton: One of the most important things an early-stage entrepreneur has to learn is how to communicate what they're doing and how to position themselves so that they can attract interest and funding. EnterpriseWorks was essential in helping us develop those skills. Coming from academia, we want to talk all about the science—the nitty-gritty details of what we're doing and how we're doing it. And that's not necessarily the focus that needs to be taken when interacting with people who are going to be supporting ForgeBee in other avenues.

Todd Gleason: This leads me to the question of what ForgeBee is, and really how you put these bees into the world so that they are successful in helping the planet feed itself.

Adam Hamilton: What we really want to do is create a totally new source of bees that beekeepers can take advantage of to produce healthy bees whenever and wherever they're needed. We want to use robotics for this. Gene alluded to the fact that we're bringing the bees into the lab from the outside environment, where they're constantly dealing with a myriad of stressors. Using robotics, we can make healthy bees which can then be shipped out to growers in disposable units, and we can manipulate the behavior of the bees so that they basically become super foragers for the amount of time they're needed for crop pollination.

Then at the end of the day, we can take these disposable units and recycle them with a new batch of bees for a new growing cycle. Most crops only bloom for about two to three weeks at a time. The way beekeepers handle this currently is they truck their own colonies vast distances, thousands of miles across the country each year. They'll start in Texas and Florida, then ship them to California at the first blush of spring to pollinate almonds. After almond pollination, they'll ship them to Washington, North Dakota, or Oregon for different crops, back to the Midwest, and then finally to the overwintering areas. This migratory pollination is very stressful for the honeybees. The travel itself brings them into areas of high population density where these different diseases can be transmitted very readily. We want to create a novel paradigm for that system where beekeepers can basically produce the bees on-site whenever and wherever they're needed, use the bees for pollination, and then pick up and move the means of production itself to a new location.

Todd Gleason: Interesting. So how are the robotics used? What do they do?

Adam Hamilton: The robotics are used to feed the baby bees. Baby bees have to be attended to very, very often and in very intricate ways. Robotics allow us to do that in the laboratory at scale. We want to be producing millions and millions of bees to be super pollinators.

Todd Gleason: And how is it that they become super foragers?

Gene Robinson: This actually hearkens back to my PhD thesis, which was on the molecular basis of division of labor. Basically, what I was looking at is how bees decide what jobs they're going to do within the colony. Bees specialize in very specific tasks over the course of their lifespan, and they can change these tasks based on what the colony is experiencing and how they're communicating with each other. We're harnessing our knowledge about the molecular basis for this to push them to do certain jobs. We can use a cocktail of neurochemicals, hormones, and pheromones to signal to the bees that they need to forage right now. They'll listen to that signal and go out and forage more readily than they would otherwise.

Todd Gleason: So, just to clarify: You raise the bees here, and you provide a unit to the end user where they grow out the foragers that they need?

Adam Hamilton: Right. Maybe it'd be best if I explain the entire system in full detail. We have three technological pillars. The first is a device that allows us to bring the queen inside into the laboratory from a normal colony. We call it the Queen Monitoring Cage. This cage is only a few inches wide and a few inches tall. We can keep her with a small number of bees, monitor her using artificial intelligence and machine vision, and provide for the cage using robotics. This keeps the queen safe from all of the different factors that might impact her health, and she'll lay eggs inside these devices.

We can easily collect those eggs and put them into the robot that Gene was referencing earlier. We call it the Bee Factory. This is a liquid-handling robot that will deposit diet to the larvae as they need it to grow from egg to adulthood. Of course, we have total control of that diet, so they're not suffering from poor nutrition and they're not going to be exposed to any diseases—especially the parasitic mites that feed on the larvae.

Once they're healthy adults, we can package them into disposable units without a queen and ship those off to beekeepers or growers for pollination purposes. Those units will have the pollination cocktail that will essentially push all of the bees to forage. Foraging bees live for about two to three weeks, which matches precisely with the amount of time that most plants bloom. At the end of a bloom, the foragers will have lived through their natural lifespan. You can then collect the physical shell of the units and reuse it for future pollination events.

Todd Gleason: That's fascinating. It seems like a magnificent way for those who need bees for a two-to-three-week period to get them without having to ship live bees across the United States.

Gene Robinson: Right. I just want to mention that we want to go one step further eventually. As we perfect the system, we not only want to produce the bees ourselves, we want to empower beekeepers to do the same thing—so they can use the same equipment that we're using to produce bees for pollination purposes on their own.

Todd Gleason: Finally, because these bees are raised so they aren't exposed to diseases and other issues, I suppose two to three weeks may not be long enough for exposure to become a problem. However, if the business were to grow dramatically, what happens to local bee populations?

Adam Hamilton: Migratory beekeeping, which is what's currently practiced, is very stressful. It's another stressor on top of the ones we've talked about already. We're hoping that without the need to move colonies as much, the local colonies that are kept in place more will be able to do better than those that have to move from place to place so many times.

Todd Gleason: Gene Robinson and Adam Hamilton believe ForgeBee is a disruptive way to improve the health of honeybees across the nation while aiding producers of crops which require pollinators. Their company is located in the EnterpriseWorks building at Research Park on the University of Illinois campus. The two are hopeful that ForgeBee technology will eventually aid in broader conservation efforts too, applying their lab rearing techniques to native and endangered pollinators like the rusty patched bumblebee. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason.

19:16 Ag Weather with Don Day
Todd Gleason: Let's turn our attention to the weather forecast for the United States now, the growing regions. We'll start, Don Day, in your part of the world there at DayWeather in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then come this way. What was the winter like there? I ask because I want to know about snowpack as well in the Rocky Mountains.

Don Day: Well, I'll tell you, this is the winter of the non-winter, as a lot of folks are calling it. If you look at the west-central high plains and west into the Rockies, it was one of the warmest, driest winters going back to either 1976, 1977, or 1981. I think it's a foregone conclusion that this will be the worst snowpack going back 50 or 60 years. So, there are big water concerns coming into the spring and summer season out West. Now, one thing that can happen out West in April and May is you can catch up a little bit, but it was not a great year if you were a skier in the West.

Todd Gleason: And that will have an impact through the Red River basin, is that correct?

Don Day: It might, yeah. You've probably heard about the wildfires in Nebraska and part of the Dakotas. Some of those far eastern areas of the plains were part of that dryness. Although there does appear to be a dividing line; really, from the Central Time Zone west is where the biggest problems have been.

Todd Gleason: So let's talk about that western part of the Central Time Zone, or what we would reference generally as the western Corn Belt—Nebraska, the Dakotas, maybe parts of Minnesota, and Kansas clearly as well. How dry is it?

Don Day: It's really interesting. If you take the extreme eastern counties of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and points east, it's not bad with precipitation. But west of that line—further west from Lincoln, Sioux Falls, and Omaha—is where things get really dry. As you get out to places like Kearney and Grand Island, Nebraska, and then central and western Kansas, that is where the dryness has really been this winter. Not only dry, but missing out on most of the cold for the winter as well. Those areas desperately need April and May to come through for them, because March certainly hasn't.

Todd Gleason: Okay, so there will be concern even in my part of the world that once you have a drought, it tends to spread. Do you think April and May will look better for them?

Don Day: Yes. However, I put an asterisk on that because we have seen so many times this winter season that our long-range forecasts—which go out six weeks at a time—have been advertising a change to wetter conditions. And they are again. However, our confidence is lower than it has been just because of how bad the model performance has been this winter season. The one thing we can say is that the weather patterns that have locked in since November should start to release and not be as much of a driving factor as we get into spring and summer. One thing we can talk about next time is that the developing El Nino is going to be a factor as we go into spring and summer as well.

Todd Gleason: We can do that. Thanks much. I appreciate it, Don.

Don Day: Thank you.

Todd Gleason: Don Day is with DayWeather in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and helped us to wrap up this Tuesday edition of the closing market report that came to you from Illinois Public Media. It's Public Radio for the Farming World. Online on demand at willag.org. I'm Extension's Todd Gleason.