Mar 30 | 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 30th day of March 2026. I'm Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Curt Kimmel. He's at agmarket.net out of Normal, Illinois. We'll take a closer look at the beef trade across the western part of the United States and the strike that's happening at the JBS processing plant in Greeley, Colorado. Then we'll turn our attention to the weather forecast as we wrap up our time together. We'll talk with Mark Russo, he's at Everstream Analytics. We'll do all of that on this Monday edition of the closing market report 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.

Todd Gleason: Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. May corn ended the day at $4.55 and three-quarters, finished six and a quarter cents lower. July, that's at $4.67 and a half at the end of the day, finished down six. New crop December, $4.84 a bushel, six and a quarter cents lower. May soybeans at $11.59 and three-quarters, up a half cent. July, $11.75, down a quarter. November beans, $11.44, unchanged. May bean meal at $314.90, down 40 cents. Bean oil at $68.47, $1.06 higher. Wheat futures, July soft red, that's the harvest month, at $6.18 and three-quarters of a cent, up two and three-quarters. July hard red at $6.40 and three-quarters, six and three-quarters of a cent lower. Live cattle futures in Chicago at the CME Group, $240.20 per hundred pounds, finished $1.42 and a half higher. Feeders at $361.32 and a half, up a buck fifty. Lean hogs down 25 cents at $105.87 and a half. Crude oil at $102.78 a barrel, that's in the WTI, up $3.14. The Brent crude oil, that's $107.29, up a buck ninety-seven. Diesel fuel or heating oil three cents lower at $4.20 and six-tenths of a cent per gallon. The wholesale price of gasoline today at $3.26 and seven-tenths, about seven and seven-tenths of a cent higher. S&P 500 down 15 points. The NASDAQ off 145. The Dow Jones Industrial Average up 131 points at this hour.

02:38 Ag Markets with Curt Kimmel

Todd Gleason: Curt Kimmel is now here to take a look at the marketplace and what happened in Chicago. Hi Curt, thanks much for being with us. Hope you had a great weekend.

Curt Kimmel: Flew by, especially if you watched basketball. There were some good games to keep everybody interested. Most of the challenge right now is trying to find some tickets to Indy, if we can approach that benchmark real quick.

Todd Gleason: You bet. The Illini won again. I did watch the end of that Purdue game. That was too bad. I really thought and was hopeful that Illinois and Purdue actually would both be in the Final Four, but not to be the case. Now, let's turn your attention to the marketplace in Chicago. Anything of real importance happened over the weekend after the losses that were suffered? By the way, good job by you and Dave Chatterton and company on Commodity Week picking the RVOs as "buy the rumor, sell the fact" because Friday was not great for soybeans.

Curt Kimmel: We finished a little firmer there. The trade is still digesting the situation. The biggest uncertainty is feed stocks coming into California, but overall the long-term picture is still optimistic from the standpoint that we're going to go down the soybean oil path here, hopefully to replace some export demand that we could possibly lose from Asia, Todd. The main focus, of course, here on Monday's close is going to be Tuesday's quarterly grain stocks report and the acreage intentions report. That'll take center stage as we go into Tuesday's trade.

Todd Gleason: What is the trade expecting? Because it really will matter where those numbers come out.

Curt Kimmel: The average guess is about where the AgMarket team is at, 94.4. There are ideas maybe it could be another half million bushels higher than that, around 95. The corn market closed lower today, six cents, so they might be anticipating a slightly larger number than that. The soybean acreage estimate guess is 85.5. The AgMarket team is around 86.1. If you go back in history, everybody's got some analog years or statistics, but on the corn number, it's been off as much as 800,000 acres. That's about as close as it's been, probably the best way to explain it. These are intentions. What materializes, we'll see as we move forward. As we've seen in the reports here in the late summer, fall, and early winter, those numbers were adjusted more, particularly harvested acres. There's a lot of zigging and zagging in here, but this will be the benchmark to go by. Analysts will add and subtract that yield from that number and come up with some demand numbers. We'll eventually see some type of ending stocks estimate for the '26 crop as we move into the spring.

Todd Gleason: When you think about the war with Iran and how long it might last, what do you see happening in the marketplace in either a "we're finished now very quickly" or an "it lasts for months" kind of scenario?

Curt Kimmel: As far as the war in general, I think there's always going to be some type of activity there. I don't believe they're going to roll over and surrender or give up. I think there's going to be some resistance for quite some time. Overall, if there would be a conclusion or agreement, I believe you'd take some volatility out of the marketplace and see the market pull back quite a bit, particularly in the energies. At the pump, I think it's going to be a long drawn-out process. I believe these energy prices or gasoline prices are going to stay firm, particularly as you go into the summer travel season. It's affecting the economy longer term if we don't see some quick results. The stock market, particularly, is starting to factor that in.

Todd Gleason: Anything from the livestock side I should know about before I let you go?

Curt Kimmel: We had some follow-through strength. A big day Friday, particularly in the fats and feeders. So we're seeing some follow-through there. Starting to gear up for cookout season here. As long as the weather cooperates, I think the consumer is just going to go to the grocery store shelf and buy something to put on the grill and not worry about the price.

Todd Gleason: Thanks much, we appreciate it.

Curt Kimmel: You bet. Take care, Todd.

Todd Gleason: You too. That's Curt Kimmel. He is with agmarket.net. Joined us on this Monday edition of the closing market report. It came to you from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org.

08:22 farmdoc Webinar | March 31 USDA Reports Promo

Todd Gleason: Starting at 11:00 a.m. Central Time tomorrow, you'll find an update, or not long thereafter, of the USDA prospective plantings and grain stocks figures. That'll be under the USDA tab. Again, that's at willag.org. The USDA March 31 reports are due out at 11:00 a.m. Central Time. To join the agricultural economists from the farmdoc team, Scott Irwin and Joe Janzen, tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. for a free webinar post-report from the United States Department of Agriculture. The prospective plantings and the grain stocks numbers are due out at 11:00 a.m. Joe and Scott will have an in-depth look at if and how any of those numbers might have changed, and you can keep track of it as well. The webinar is absolutely free. You can sign up on our website at willag.org.

08:55 Drought and Workers Strike May Reconfigure U.S. Beef Processing

Todd Gleason: Let's revisit today the worker strike taking place at the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado. We've talked about this in the past. However, my colleague at the National Association of Farm Broadcasting, Caesar Delgado, a couple of weeks ago spoke with Charles Martinez from the University of Tennessee and Dave Weaber, who is with Terrain Ag—that is part of the Ag Credit Services servicing the Dakotas, Kansas, Colorado, and some other places, I think into Iowa as well—about the beef supply, the drought in the western part of the United States, and the JBS plant closure because of the strike. We'll start with what that strike meant at the time. Charles Martinez, again with the University of Tennessee and an agricultural economist there, will begin our conversation.

Charles Martinez: Whenever we think about that strike in itself and we think about the supply chain and how it's laid out, the strike itself is going to have more of a short-run impact at the fed cattle level. The longer it goes, the more impact it can have on feeder cattle markets, specifically if we just think about fundamentals of demand and supply. A packing plant not operating or a company not operating decreases demand. A demand decrease means we have a price decrease.

Todd Gleason: Usually it takes time to decode things, but let's do that. Fed cattle are those cattle that have been fed out and are ready for market. Feeder cattle, of course, are just exactly what they sound like: calves that are being fed and headed to market eventually, probably a few months out. Now here's Caesar Delgado.

Caesar Delgado: Dave, you've got a front-row seat of it. What is your position on the technicals and the facts?

Todd Gleason: I'm sorry, there are some interchangeable words here. Fed cattle, fat cattle, or live cattle are all the same thing. Now here's Dave Weaber. He is with Terrain Ag.

Dave Weaber: The strike and the ongoing impacts seem to be a slow-moving grind with the contract haven't been expired back in last July. There's been risk of this coming. The feed yards that supply the plant have been on edge and alert to the coming events. The cattle that were supposed to be slaughtered there last week—we didn't kill anything last week in the plant before the strike even started—have been reallocated to other JBS facilities. I would expect that Grand Island and the Cactus, Texas Dumas plant would have taken the bulk of those cattle. The live cash trade in Colorado isn't large, so that means those are all contracted, committed cattle, so JBS was obligated to take them. I imagine there's some freight allowance and some kind of things going on to get those cattle moved. The challenge probably becomes more of a Texas-Nebraska problem, because now those cattle are filling in what would have been cash trade into those other JBS facilities, and then they're probably pushing some cash trade into some other plants as well. If you look at Southeast Colorado, maybe some cattle going into Finney County and Dodge City, those kind of places, maybe Liberal as well. So we're going to start to see those cattle supplies probably bolster Texas, maybe to an advantage, to get their slaughter numbers filled up.

Todd Gleason: I'll drop back in here for a moment because I did talk to Dave Weaber earlier today about the economics of these slaughter plants. He says since the beginning of this JBS strike by its workers, the economics have shifted from losing money to making money. A lot of that has to do with total inventory and at what capacity the plant is operating.

Dave Weaber: As we look at the total inventory, near-term effects are probably more psychological. Long-term worries about the resizing of packing capacity, which we've been thinking is going to be coming. Tyson did their part on the closure of Lexington, single shift in Amarillo. We're still overcapacity compared to the cattle numbers. Until we see this drought break and the growth in beef replacement heifers and cow-calf operation numbers, we'd probably continue to see a grindingly slow decline in available feeder cattle and calf supplies.

Todd Gleason: I did take a moment when I was talking with Dave Weaber this morning to ask him if the cattlemen in the western part of the United States were concerned about long-term drought. Remember, if you've listened for a while, you know that USDA in 2019-2020 held a webinar that pointed towards the changing climate and the possibility that long-term drought—decades long rather than maybe a few years long—might take hold in the western United States. He said yes, they were. Now here's Caesar Delgado again.

Caesar Delgado: How about you, Charlie? Do you have some concerns about economic growth?

Charles Martinez: Tailing what Dave said, I think he did a good job of just highlighting some of the broader macro movers that impact the demand side of things for beef. But if we look at any industry, if you look around, the uncertainty around a lot of things is one of the things that, regardless of if you're in agriculture or not, is impacting the decisions that you're making today throughout the rest of the year. One thing we've learned over the last year is you can have fundamentals to a tee and know everything that's going to happen fundamentally, but then a news outbreak or a geopolitical movement can alter a lot of things pretty rapidly. Even to the point of a random morning to an afternoon can change a lot of things. I don't think I have a quote-unquote concern, but it's more of what can happen tomorrow or what can happen next week that we don't foresee happening right now. What are the unknown unknowns that can impact us? One of the things that we do know: yesterday rates stayed where they were going to be because of what's been happening with the Iran conflict and inflation. That is still on the tip of the tongue of a worry out of the Federal Reserve. It's a signal that inflation is still not going down because of things that are out of the control of a lot of folks, in particular geopolitical conflicts. So my concern more about what can happen into the next couple of months, the rest of this year and even next year, is just the uncertainty of random events happening that can cause disturbances throughout every market that you're looking at, whether it is agriculture or not agriculture.

Todd Gleason: That's Charles Martinez. He is an agricultural economist at the University of Tennessee and spoke with Caesar Delgado a couple of weeks ago. Our thanks, by the way, go to Caesar for providing me the audio. With Charlie and Dave Weaber, who is with Terrain Ag, that's an affiliated company of the Farm Credit Services that serve the western part of the United States.

16:52 Ag Weather with Mark Russo

Todd Gleason: Let's turn our attention to the global growing regions. We'll stay in the Northern Hemisphere today with Mark Russo. He's at Everstream Analytics. Hi, Mark. Thanks for being with us today.

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

Todd Gleason: I'd like to begin in the hard red winter wheat growing regions of the Plains states. I know there are difficult issues, or have been at least, in the Colorado and Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska area. Can you tell me about them?

Mark Russo: Yes. For the Plains hard red winter wheat belt, that's really the problem area right now for crops in the U.S. due to extreme soil moisture deficits, much of which have really increased significantly over the past few weeks. If you go back over the winter, parts of Kansas fared well with precipitation, but the rest of the hard red belt did not do really well. Once we've gotten into the past month or two, virtually the entire Plains was bone dry and also temperatures at record levels. So that has depleted soil moisture significantly. It puts a great emphasis on rain activity improving across the region to improve soil moisture as crops are accelerating through spring growth with this well-above normal and in some cases record temperatures that are prevailing across the region. That is the main item of note right now in the Plains.

Todd Gleason: Then turn your attention to the Midwest, the corn belt in particular. What do you see for the planting season?

Mark Russo: Right now we see favorable weather, especially looking out from now through and into the remainder of April. One of the keys here is that in recent weeks we've seen soil moisture improve significantly across the Midwest. So that has been very timely for boosting soil moisture. The pattern over the next two weeks is active, so that will further boost soil moisture. Temperatures though will be a little bit warmer biased. So we're not seeing any turn to unseasonably cold temperatures that would prevail for any extended periods of time. Even with this wetter outlook the next couple of weeks, we think that things start to ease after that. So right now it's looking quite good here for summer crop planting in the Midwest.

Todd Gleason: By active, are we hit or miss or is everybody getting something, and if that's the case, how much?

Mark Russo: There are several storm systems that will be moving across the Midwest over the next few weeks. They do look to produce more widespread, significant rains. Some of the rains are going to be convective in nature, in other words, thunderstorms developing. That will at times result in some scattered storm activity. A few areas may miss out, but due to these more potent systems coming through, it does look like the vast majority of acreage will be picking up meaningful rain.

Todd Gleason: What is the primary driver?

Mark Russo: The primary driver is that there's actually colder air to the north across Canada, the northern tier of the U.S., but it looks to stay up in that area rather than plunging southward. You have that one feature to the north, and then south of that is unseasonably warm temperatures. That temperature gradient across the Midwest, let alone much of the central and eastern U.S., with anomalous cool weather to the north, anomalous warmth to the south, that is a good setup for active conditions and abundant precipitation.

Todd Gleason: Now, that pool of cool weather to the north has dipped into the Midwest, deep into the United States occasionally since last November. Any reason to think it might do that again, and if so, when?

Mark Russo: We don't see any significant risks for that. A lot of it is just the time of season. When you have more of those bigger dips of Arctic cold coming in from Canada, you need the polar vortex to be elongated or highly unstable. While we did see that over the winter, and it still is a little bit unstable right now, the polar vortex basically dissipates as you move through the month of April. We're not seeing any kind of big stretches of the vortex for this time of year. You can still have it in Canada, like we're going to see, but to push it further south into the mid-latitude ag belts or lower 48 or places like southern Europe or China, it just becomes really tough to do here at this stage of the season.

Todd Gleason: Finally, check in on the Black Sea area, the growing regions of Russia and Ukraine.

Mark Russo: They're in pretty good shape here right now from a winter crop development standpoint, as well as pre-planting conditions for summer crops. For soil moisture, last year those areas of Europe and the Black Sea region, especially Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region, had very dry conditions, and that has resulted in low subsoil moisture. Over the winter, and even dating back to last fall, we did see improvements in topsoil moisture. That has helped to reduce some of the dryness, but it has not fully replenished subsoil moisture. That's the only thing to keep an eye on for Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region. But from a pattern standpoint coming up, from an opportunity standpoint, there are systems that are going to increase precipitation across much of those areas. We do feel that as we move into April, topsoil moisture will be improving there.

Todd Gleason: Thanks much. I appreciate it.

Mark Russo: You're welcome, Todd.

Todd Gleason: That's Mark Russo. He is with Everstream Analytics, helped us to wrap up this Monday edition of the closing market report that came to you from Illinois Public Media online on demand at willag.org. I'm Extension's Todd Gleason.