USDA released the Sunday night Crop Progress Report Monday after the close, and it was not pretty. Harvest still drags on, and rain coming into the Midwest this week will not help.
Thanksgiving will come and go with corn, and even soybeans, still in the fields.
One of the biggest traditions of my youth was […]

December corn futures gained 9 cents in the last five minutes of trade Monday. Traders seemed to be reacting to fears of lack of harvest progress.
USDA released new harvest numbers after the close that seemed to confirm the bullishness.
December futures had a 24-cent range from high to low Monday. We had a spike […]

There has been a lot of grain market volatility to confuse things. One day, we were up 4 cents and the next down 4 cents. The optimist says we are going higher, the pessimist says we are going lower, and the realist says the market did nothing for those two days.

I have had bird feeders close to the house for 35 years. The bear tore them down a couple of times a few years ago, and we had to stop feeding for a month. Other than that we have always fed a herd of a few hundred “livestock” as I call them.

Regular customers

Most of […]

Two old axioms of the grain trade cropped up in conversations last week. One is that a big crop keeps getting bigger. The other is that the cure for low prices is low prices.

We can’t go back to the markets of 2008.

The Clearfield, Pa., ethanol plant currently under construction by Bionol Clearfield LLC, a unit of Bio Energy International of Quincy, Mass., is expected to start taking corn in November and to be operational in January.

Many questions remain as we approach the end of the crop year. Not the least of these is: What size crop do we have?

USDA will release the Supply and Demand Report Wednesday, and, as usual, it represents an untimely truth for this grain market columnist.
I write this on Monday before the market opens, and the reader gets this Thursday, after the report and after some market reaction to it.
The numbers
Monday, the markets were sharply mixed, with […]

For the first time in a long time, corn has had days as the leading grain on the Chicago Board of Trade.
That is to say, some days the gains in corn were more than the gains in wheat or soybeans. Some days, the beans matched the corn, but with a higher-priced commodity where the […]