Episode Number
10476
Episode Show Notes / Description
On this edition of the Closing Market Report, Todd Gleason speaks with Mike Zuzolo of Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting about post-election commodity market reactions, the impact of a stronger U.S. dollar, and global trade dynamics ahead of the upcoming WASDE report. Then, Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions discusses the Midwest's transition from an unusually warm fall to its first significant frost, alongside a look at persistent dry patterns extending across the United States. The program concludes with an analysis of South American weather, noting favorable early planting conditions in Brazil but highlighting potential La Niña-driven risks for Argentina and Southern Brazil later in the season.
00:52 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting
07:32 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
00:52 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting
07:32 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
Transcript
cmr261106
On this edition of the Closing Market Report, Todd Gleason speaks with Mike Zuzolo of Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting about post-election commodity market reactions, the impact of a stronger U.S. dollar, and global trade dynamics ahead of the upcoming WASDE report. Then, Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions discusses the Midwest's transition from an unusually warm fall to its first significant frost, alongside a look at persistent dry patterns extending across the United States. The program concludes with an analysis of South American weather, noting favorable early planting conditions in Brazil but highlighting potential La Niña-driven risks for Argentina and Southern Brazil later in the season.
00:52 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting
07:32 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
---
Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report for the sixth day of November 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 Eric Snodgrass will join us too, with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible, to discuss the weather forecast. If you can stay with us for the whole of the hour here on our home station, you'll hear all of our commodity week program. If not, you'll hear a portion of it. Our guests this week included Ellen Dearden, Dave Chatterton, and Brian Split. You'll want to make sure that you stay with us right here on Illinois Public Media.
Announce: Todd Gleason's services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
00:52 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting
Todd Gleason: Mike Zuzolo of globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, now joins us on this Friday to take a look at the marketplace. Hi Mike, thanks for being with us. Let's talk about the week. We'll need to put the election in this as well. Tell me how things progressed through the week, what's changed if anything, or those things that maybe have not changed?
Mike Zuzolo: Stepping into the election fray, Todd, heading into the WASDE report Tuesday as well as the Black Sea trade negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to open the grain corridor up—those three things, one in the past, two in the future—I think the market is trying to assimilate into a post-election mindset where the dollar is looking stronger as the week progressed. That was mainly due to the idea that it's becoming more of a safe haven instead of a weaker energy market creating weaker inflation, creating the Federal Reserve environment to not have to raise rates. Initially, the dollar fell, but then later in the week, especially with the stock market break to the downside so severe, the dollar made new monthly highs by Friday morning, helped by a very strong jobs report.
So what we talked about before the election last Friday, kind of trying to sew that up and wrap that up, this election was very much like 1986. President Reagan's second term, he lost eight Senate seats, he traveled to 22 states, about 25,000 miles, and didn't really do any good in the election itself. So I'm still very much in that back-to-the-future mindset politically, and what that could mean to the macro environment and that stronger dollar. That's going to be crucial and it's going to play right into if we have a stronger dollar going forward into the end of the year, we're going to need some good analysis and some good outcomes when it comes to the WASDE report. Specifically what Ukraine and Russia maybe have in supply, but what they can actually get out the door. I'm going to read very closely to see if WASDE and USDA say anything about, "We're assuming the Black Sea opens," or "We're sticking with the idea that the Black Sea stays closed," and kind of those tea leaf type things, and obviously corn and bean yields.
Todd Gleason: Do you think USDA will include that in their World Ag Supply and Demand estimates? The board sometimes does, I suppose. Have you seen that recently? I've not paid enough attention to that global figure.
Mike Zuzolo: Yeah, it's been several months that it was on another topic that they like the Department of Energy will say, "We're assuming this because of what's going on right now, no changes." What I'm really driving at, Todd, is earlier this week, we had two huge dots that I think connected that makes sense why the European corn, even with the November expiring and dropping about a dollar and a half a bushel, is still sitting at $7 a bushel. The first thing that happened was the Ukraine attache, the USDA attache, came in and slashed those corn exports for Ukraine from 22 million tons to 10.2, so over a 50% drop, and threw that into the ending stocks figure, saying the crop is there but they're not going to get it out the door. So what does the official WASDE do now a week later after that Ukrainian attache report comes out?
Number two, one of the things that we talked about, I think, was the idea that the end users globally come in from the cold and say, "I'm not getting Ukraine and Russian stocks and supplies, I need to go to the international tender." Turkey did that in a big way, putting out 295,000 on an international tender for corn. So I still feel as though there is a really strong opening for the United States, to a lesser degree Brazil and Argentina, to get a lot of corn, especially that Ukraine normally gets.
Todd Gleason: Okay, so corn available, moving maybe through the export market out of the United States. China this week, attache again, said that they thought that China would use 5 million metric tons less soybeans than they have in the past, they think from 120 to 115. What do you think of that number?
Mike Zuzolo: Those numbers are all over the place and they have been for about three years now. You've got the CASDE and you've got privates, you've got USDA, and the attache did a really good job putting in a table of where all these estimates lie. I have always felt as though, because of the hog industry in China, as long as the hogs keep going down, it really worries me about the meal demand and what kind of crushing China is going to take on as we go forward. It really opens up the idea that with the Democrats taking over both sides of the house, the US-China trade relationship is going to be a very key element to the next three months, because in four or five months, without a weather market in South America, I think it's very easy to see that China will go after more Brazil and Argentine beans and leave us essentially high and dry.
So this is an issue we've talked about for probably a good year at this stage and it's starting to unfortunately come true. It makes me think that corn is the most undervalued; wheat is right there underneath the corn as far as undervalue. The soybeans, I would say, are slightly undervalued, but it would not shock me to see an $11.40 soybean price in lead month futures and an $11.00 November '27 price if we lose that Chinese demand. So that's again why the dollar is so important and why I think that the soybeans are still a tougher market to try and grab a hold of. It's a weather market more than anything and it's an energy market because soybean oil lost a lot this week.
Todd Gleason: Do those figures include an increase in soybean yield in the United States?
Mike Zuzolo: No, I'm using my numbers, I'm not using USDA's. I'll tack my numbers up a half a bushel, but that puts me at 52.5 on beans and it puts me at 178 on corn. So if USDA goes up, I'm pretty satisfied where I'm at.
Todd Gleason: Okay, thank you much. I appreciate it.
Mike Zuzolo: Thank you sir, have a great weekend.
Todd Gleason: You too, that's Mike Zuzolo. He's at globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas.
07:32 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
Todd Gleason: Let's turn our attention to the weather forecast now. Eric Snodgrass is here from Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible. Hello Eric, thanks for being with us on a Friday.
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, thanks for having me on again.
Todd Gleason: Okay, so one of the things I wanted to talk about is just how warm it's been for how long. Weather—I don't think we've had a frost, certainly not a freeze. I've seen some frost occasionally, but nothing deep yet. Do we have anything coming soon?
Eric Snodgrass: We do, tomorrow morning. That's going to be our first one around here. Our typical first frost date, we'll call that 32 degrees, and you can verify this with Trent too, but it's usually somewhere around the 14th to the 17th of October. And we've gotten down into the mid-30s, we've had a couple cooler nights, but we've not actually hit that here yet. So we're about three plus weeks late, and tomorrow morning we're going to end that. We've got some nice cool air that's coming in. It's temporary, I mean we're going to warm back up, but we're going to have our first frost tomorrow morning. So I'm tonight going to go disconnect all the hoses, make sure all that stuff is taken care of because it's just that time of year. But then I'll probably reconnect them because of the warmth coming next week and I'm going to wash my car, because Todd, the second component to this is we're going on a pretty long dry stretch.
Todd Gleason: Oh really? How long?
Eric Snodgrass: I mean right now the Pacific jet is extending, and it's going to hammer the British Columbia coast, it's eventually going to get into the Northwest, it's going to hit California, maybe not for another week or so, but all the action is going to be West. We're going to have this nice big split flow over the mid-section of the country, and we may not see what I would call measurable rainfall that would matter until maybe the 19th or 20th. We could go quite a long time right around here without seeing much more rain. So, fall leaf cleanup, Todd, it's on, let's get it done. But also, they gotta finish harvest, do some fall application. So we don't want to see these temperatures cranking back up during this drier weather. They are going to go back over warmer, but overall I think we're going to be able to keep our soil temps between 50 and 55, which could be good for getting some of that fall work done.
Todd Gleason: So overnight lows in the mid-30s, upper highs in the 50s and 60s?
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah. I mean we might see quite a few days in the 60s, so this is going to be a nice dry run. And by the way, that's atypical of El Niño. Normally, Novembers come through with much more activity. It's just all the activity right now is going to be on the West Coast, and we're not going to see it here until we get to the week leading up to Thanksgiving.
Todd Gleason: Let me ask one other question. I'm going to go back to 2000. You spoke, or maybe it was others at the ALL IN union, about what the changing climate might do and how much longer our growing season would be. How things would shift across an arc so that the hill country of Texas weather would move to the northeast and around an arc through Illinois, and then through in North Dakota. And certainly, we've seen lots of things happen. Some of that is technical, meaning North Dakota has a longer growing season but it also has more drought-resistant corn, which also brought along with it soybean production in that area. How different is our world here today, if at all, from then?
Eric Snodgrass: You know, some of those back in the early 2000s, there were some projections that by 2050, the climate in Illinois might be like Dallas, and we're not there yet, but then again, it's 2026, we've got quite a ways to go. So I'm going to set that aside just because those were some pretty bold predictions and they just need to be reconsidered in light of some of the recent trends. But this is a trend I want everybody to know: our spring last frost has not moved much in the last 45 years. Now, that doesn't mean we've not gotten warmer in February or March, but the last frost date, which is typically some point in mid-April, that's actually been flat, it's not changed much around here.
What has changed is we've added on average about 10 or 11 days to the end of the growing season where we've pushed our last frost date back a bit. And with all of that getting pushed back, again, I'm just looking back over the last 40, 45 years, with all of that, we've accumulated an extra 250 GDDs. Now, it's hard to use them, right? I'd rather have those in April than I would have them in October. But the longer-term trend is toward more mild falls. Now that doesn't mean every fall is going to be mild, but the October-November trend is up to the tune of about two and a half degrees in total since 1980. And I think that's significant and important because it is a what we call a climate shift, right? I mean that's been observed and we just need to take that into account. The question I think is going to be is, what if anything can you do with it, other than you're just packing on some heat late into the crop to get it to finish.
Todd Gleason: I wonder about grain fill. I'll have to ask the agronomist on campus. But I feel like those 250 growing degree days might help grain fill out. We'll see whether that's really the case, I'll check on that later. What else do you want to talk about today?
Eric Snodgrass: Well, we got new long-range content in from the European model. We'll get the others this weekend and early next week, and here's what it did. So El Niño is still on this blazing path toward well over 4 degrees C in terms of its peak sea surface temperature anomaly. And if that number doesn't mean anything to anybody, that's not only just a new record, but it's a new record by almost a full degree. Okay, secondly, what does that mean? We tend to have a much more active southern tier of the jet stream, more limited interaction with cold air. Now, that doesn't mean we don't get cold air, but it's much more limited. And Todd, right now, all the cold air in the Northern Hemisphere is over Russia and Mongolia and Siberia. And that's what's helping to kick off the super powerful Pacific jet. But for us, there's no really cold air in Canada to tap into just yet. So we might be waiting quite a while on any sort of sustained cold conditions. I'm talking like more than just two days. And unfortunately, that looks like more of November, December are mild.
But here's the important thing, okay? Newest run from the European model even went wetter. Normally during an El Niño, the Ohio Valley is a little drier than average, which is fine, spring rains fix all of our problems. But now we're starting to see some of those gaps fill in. And the new model run, I'm telling you, Todd, right now the drought monitor says about 70% coverage in the US, and again that includes the D0 category. We may be down to 30% by the time we get into April of next year. And I'll just put this out there, the snow path is going to be more southern tier. So we could get plenty of snow here in Illinois, nothing stopping that. But it's just not going to last. So if you don't have a functioning snowblower or like a good shovel or anybody to shovel for you, patience might just win the day. Just like, "Oh it snowed, but maybe by tomorrow we'll be back up in the low 40s and it'll go away." That's the current thought process on winter right now, Todd. I think that's it.
Todd Gleason: I like that. Patience might win out.
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, just sit at home, drink some coffee and wait.
Todd Gleason: El Niño in South America.
Eric Snodgrass: So I checked this morning the NDVI values, looking at plant health from space, it's the highest it's been in 25 years for this crop coming out of South America. Now why? It's been really wet across much of the growing areas and they planted pretty quickly. There are still some troubles in the Amazon with moisture, new model runs are completely split. The European model is trying to soak nearly everyone with good rains, but the GFS and other models are a little drier farther to the north. Now what we typically worry about, and we talked about this last week, is that as El Niño continues to flex its muscles in South America, the center-west and northern growing areas tend to struggle with consistent monsoonal rains. You combine that with the fact they didn't put in an extra 4% of acres this year, maybe at most it's a half percent. We could have a weather issue, but it's not now, it's going to be December or January that that happens. Southern Brazil's problem is it's just been too wet. It's just been very wet, they've been delayed, we've got more rain coming. And so they're fighting what we kind of fought... I wouldn't call it a 2019-type spring for them, but they're certainly fighting raindrops to try to get the crop established.
Todd Gleason: Hey thank you much, I appreciate it.
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, you bet.
Todd Gleason: Eric Snodgrass is with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible and helped us to wrap up this Friday edition of the Closing Market Report.
On this edition of the Closing Market Report, Todd Gleason speaks with Mike Zuzolo of Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting about post-election commodity market reactions, the impact of a stronger U.S. dollar, and global trade dynamics ahead of the upcoming WASDE report. Then, Eric Snodgrass from Nutrien Ag Solutions discusses the Midwest's transition from an unusually warm fall to its first significant frost, alongside a look at persistent dry patterns extending across the United States. The program concludes with an analysis of South American weather, noting favorable early planting conditions in Brazil but highlighting potential La Niña-driven risks for Argentina and Southern Brazil later in the season.
00:52 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting
07:32 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
---
Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report for the sixth day of November 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 Eric Snodgrass will join us too, with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible, to discuss the weather forecast. If you can stay with us for the whole of the hour here on our home station, you'll hear all of our commodity week program. If not, you'll hear a portion of it. Our guests this week included Ellen Dearden, Dave Chatterton, and Brian Split. You'll want to make sure that you stay with us right here on Illinois Public Media.
Announce: Todd Gleason's services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
00:52 Ag Markets with Mike Zuzolo, Global Commodity Analytics and Consulting
Todd Gleason: Mike Zuzolo of globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, now joins us on this Friday to take a look at the marketplace. Hi Mike, thanks for being with us. Let's talk about the week. We'll need to put the election in this as well. Tell me how things progressed through the week, what's changed if anything, or those things that maybe have not changed?
Mike Zuzolo: Stepping into the election fray, Todd, heading into the WASDE report Tuesday as well as the Black Sea trade negotiations between Ukraine and Russia to open the grain corridor up—those three things, one in the past, two in the future—I think the market is trying to assimilate into a post-election mindset where the dollar is looking stronger as the week progressed. That was mainly due to the idea that it's becoming more of a safe haven instead of a weaker energy market creating weaker inflation, creating the Federal Reserve environment to not have to raise rates. Initially, the dollar fell, but then later in the week, especially with the stock market break to the downside so severe, the dollar made new monthly highs by Friday morning, helped by a very strong jobs report.
So what we talked about before the election last Friday, kind of trying to sew that up and wrap that up, this election was very much like 1986. President Reagan's second term, he lost eight Senate seats, he traveled to 22 states, about 25,000 miles, and didn't really do any good in the election itself. So I'm still very much in that back-to-the-future mindset politically, and what that could mean to the macro environment and that stronger dollar. That's going to be crucial and it's going to play right into if we have a stronger dollar going forward into the end of the year, we're going to need some good analysis and some good outcomes when it comes to the WASDE report. Specifically what Ukraine and Russia maybe have in supply, but what they can actually get out the door. I'm going to read very closely to see if WASDE and USDA say anything about, "We're assuming the Black Sea opens," or "We're sticking with the idea that the Black Sea stays closed," and kind of those tea leaf type things, and obviously corn and bean yields.
Todd Gleason: Do you think USDA will include that in their World Ag Supply and Demand estimates? The board sometimes does, I suppose. Have you seen that recently? I've not paid enough attention to that global figure.
Mike Zuzolo: Yeah, it's been several months that it was on another topic that they like the Department of Energy will say, "We're assuming this because of what's going on right now, no changes." What I'm really driving at, Todd, is earlier this week, we had two huge dots that I think connected that makes sense why the European corn, even with the November expiring and dropping about a dollar and a half a bushel, is still sitting at $7 a bushel. The first thing that happened was the Ukraine attache, the USDA attache, came in and slashed those corn exports for Ukraine from 22 million tons to 10.2, so over a 50% drop, and threw that into the ending stocks figure, saying the crop is there but they're not going to get it out the door. So what does the official WASDE do now a week later after that Ukrainian attache report comes out?
Number two, one of the things that we talked about, I think, was the idea that the end users globally come in from the cold and say, "I'm not getting Ukraine and Russian stocks and supplies, I need to go to the international tender." Turkey did that in a big way, putting out 295,000 on an international tender for corn. So I still feel as though there is a really strong opening for the United States, to a lesser degree Brazil and Argentina, to get a lot of corn, especially that Ukraine normally gets.
Todd Gleason: Okay, so corn available, moving maybe through the export market out of the United States. China this week, attache again, said that they thought that China would use 5 million metric tons less soybeans than they have in the past, they think from 120 to 115. What do you think of that number?
Mike Zuzolo: Those numbers are all over the place and they have been for about three years now. You've got the CASDE and you've got privates, you've got USDA, and the attache did a really good job putting in a table of where all these estimates lie. I have always felt as though, because of the hog industry in China, as long as the hogs keep going down, it really worries me about the meal demand and what kind of crushing China is going to take on as we go forward. It really opens up the idea that with the Democrats taking over both sides of the house, the US-China trade relationship is going to be a very key element to the next three months, because in four or five months, without a weather market in South America, I think it's very easy to see that China will go after more Brazil and Argentine beans and leave us essentially high and dry.
So this is an issue we've talked about for probably a good year at this stage and it's starting to unfortunately come true. It makes me think that corn is the most undervalued; wheat is right there underneath the corn as far as undervalue. The soybeans, I would say, are slightly undervalued, but it would not shock me to see an $11.40 soybean price in lead month futures and an $11.00 November '27 price if we lose that Chinese demand. So that's again why the dollar is so important and why I think that the soybeans are still a tougher market to try and grab a hold of. It's a weather market more than anything and it's an energy market because soybean oil lost a lot this week.
Todd Gleason: Do those figures include an increase in soybean yield in the United States?
Mike Zuzolo: No, I'm using my numbers, I'm not using USDA's. I'll tack my numbers up a half a bushel, but that puts me at 52.5 on beans and it puts me at 178 on corn. So if USDA goes up, I'm pretty satisfied where I'm at.
Todd Gleason: Okay, thank you much. I appreciate it.
Mike Zuzolo: Thank you sir, have a great weekend.
Todd Gleason: You too, that's Mike Zuzolo. He's at globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas.
07:32 Ag Weather with Eric Snodgrass, Nutrien Ag Solutions
Todd Gleason: Let's turn our attention to the weather forecast now. Eric Snodgrass is here from Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible. Hello Eric, thanks for being with us on a Friday.
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, thanks for having me on again.
Todd Gleason: Okay, so one of the things I wanted to talk about is just how warm it's been for how long. Weather—I don't think we've had a frost, certainly not a freeze. I've seen some frost occasionally, but nothing deep yet. Do we have anything coming soon?
Eric Snodgrass: We do, tomorrow morning. That's going to be our first one around here. Our typical first frost date, we'll call that 32 degrees, and you can verify this with Trent too, but it's usually somewhere around the 14th to the 17th of October. And we've gotten down into the mid-30s, we've had a couple cooler nights, but we've not actually hit that here yet. So we're about three plus weeks late, and tomorrow morning we're going to end that. We've got some nice cool air that's coming in. It's temporary, I mean we're going to warm back up, but we're going to have our first frost tomorrow morning. So I'm tonight going to go disconnect all the hoses, make sure all that stuff is taken care of because it's just that time of year. But then I'll probably reconnect them because of the warmth coming next week and I'm going to wash my car, because Todd, the second component to this is we're going on a pretty long dry stretch.
Todd Gleason: Oh really? How long?
Eric Snodgrass: I mean right now the Pacific jet is extending, and it's going to hammer the British Columbia coast, it's eventually going to get into the Northwest, it's going to hit California, maybe not for another week or so, but all the action is going to be West. We're going to have this nice big split flow over the mid-section of the country, and we may not see what I would call measurable rainfall that would matter until maybe the 19th or 20th. We could go quite a long time right around here without seeing much more rain. So, fall leaf cleanup, Todd, it's on, let's get it done. But also, they gotta finish harvest, do some fall application. So we don't want to see these temperatures cranking back up during this drier weather. They are going to go back over warmer, but overall I think we're going to be able to keep our soil temps between 50 and 55, which could be good for getting some of that fall work done.
Todd Gleason: So overnight lows in the mid-30s, upper highs in the 50s and 60s?
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah. I mean we might see quite a few days in the 60s, so this is going to be a nice dry run. And by the way, that's atypical of El Niño. Normally, Novembers come through with much more activity. It's just all the activity right now is going to be on the West Coast, and we're not going to see it here until we get to the week leading up to Thanksgiving.
Todd Gleason: Let me ask one other question. I'm going to go back to 2000. You spoke, or maybe it was others at the ALL IN union, about what the changing climate might do and how much longer our growing season would be. How things would shift across an arc so that the hill country of Texas weather would move to the northeast and around an arc through Illinois, and then through in North Dakota. And certainly, we've seen lots of things happen. Some of that is technical, meaning North Dakota has a longer growing season but it also has more drought-resistant corn, which also brought along with it soybean production in that area. How different is our world here today, if at all, from then?
Eric Snodgrass: You know, some of those back in the early 2000s, there were some projections that by 2050, the climate in Illinois might be like Dallas, and we're not there yet, but then again, it's 2026, we've got quite a ways to go. So I'm going to set that aside just because those were some pretty bold predictions and they just need to be reconsidered in light of some of the recent trends. But this is a trend I want everybody to know: our spring last frost has not moved much in the last 45 years. Now, that doesn't mean we've not gotten warmer in February or March, but the last frost date, which is typically some point in mid-April, that's actually been flat, it's not changed much around here.
What has changed is we've added on average about 10 or 11 days to the end of the growing season where we've pushed our last frost date back a bit. And with all of that getting pushed back, again, I'm just looking back over the last 40, 45 years, with all of that, we've accumulated an extra 250 GDDs. Now, it's hard to use them, right? I'd rather have those in April than I would have them in October. But the longer-term trend is toward more mild falls. Now that doesn't mean every fall is going to be mild, but the October-November trend is up to the tune of about two and a half degrees in total since 1980. And I think that's significant and important because it is a what we call a climate shift, right? I mean that's been observed and we just need to take that into account. The question I think is going to be is, what if anything can you do with it, other than you're just packing on some heat late into the crop to get it to finish.
Todd Gleason: I wonder about grain fill. I'll have to ask the agronomist on campus. But I feel like those 250 growing degree days might help grain fill out. We'll see whether that's really the case, I'll check on that later. What else do you want to talk about today?
Eric Snodgrass: Well, we got new long-range content in from the European model. We'll get the others this weekend and early next week, and here's what it did. So El Niño is still on this blazing path toward well over 4 degrees C in terms of its peak sea surface temperature anomaly. And if that number doesn't mean anything to anybody, that's not only just a new record, but it's a new record by almost a full degree. Okay, secondly, what does that mean? We tend to have a much more active southern tier of the jet stream, more limited interaction with cold air. Now, that doesn't mean we don't get cold air, but it's much more limited. And Todd, right now, all the cold air in the Northern Hemisphere is over Russia and Mongolia and Siberia. And that's what's helping to kick off the super powerful Pacific jet. But for us, there's no really cold air in Canada to tap into just yet. So we might be waiting quite a while on any sort of sustained cold conditions. I'm talking like more than just two days. And unfortunately, that looks like more of November, December are mild.
But here's the important thing, okay? Newest run from the European model even went wetter. Normally during an El Niño, the Ohio Valley is a little drier than average, which is fine, spring rains fix all of our problems. But now we're starting to see some of those gaps fill in. And the new model run, I'm telling you, Todd, right now the drought monitor says about 70% coverage in the US, and again that includes the D0 category. We may be down to 30% by the time we get into April of next year. And I'll just put this out there, the snow path is going to be more southern tier. So we could get plenty of snow here in Illinois, nothing stopping that. But it's just not going to last. So if you don't have a functioning snowblower or like a good shovel or anybody to shovel for you, patience might just win the day. Just like, "Oh it snowed, but maybe by tomorrow we'll be back up in the low 40s and it'll go away." That's the current thought process on winter right now, Todd. I think that's it.
Todd Gleason: I like that. Patience might win out.
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, just sit at home, drink some coffee and wait.
Todd Gleason: El Niño in South America.
Eric Snodgrass: So I checked this morning the NDVI values, looking at plant health from space, it's the highest it's been in 25 years for this crop coming out of South America. Now why? It's been really wet across much of the growing areas and they planted pretty quickly. There are still some troubles in the Amazon with moisture, new model runs are completely split. The European model is trying to soak nearly everyone with good rains, but the GFS and other models are a little drier farther to the north. Now what we typically worry about, and we talked about this last week, is that as El Niño continues to flex its muscles in South America, the center-west and northern growing areas tend to struggle with consistent monsoonal rains. You combine that with the fact they didn't put in an extra 4% of acres this year, maybe at most it's a half percent. We could have a weather issue, but it's not now, it's going to be December or January that that happens. Southern Brazil's problem is it's just been too wet. It's just been very wet, they've been delayed, we've got more rain coming. And so they're fighting what we kind of fought... I wouldn't call it a 2019-type spring for them, but they're certainly fighting raindrops to try to get the crop established.
Todd Gleason: Hey thank you much, I appreciate it.
Eric Snodgrass: Yeah, you bet.
Todd Gleason: Eric Snodgrass is with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrible and helped us to wrap up this Friday edition of the Closing Market Report.