Katie Geerdes

This week's planting progress numbers did not trigger any alarms for the market, as corn plantings were just ahead of their 5-year average at 12 percent while soybeans at 8 percent were double their normal pace.  Even the recently water-logged Delta states had caught up on row crop and cotton plantings. Patchy spring storms have still made for somewhat of a sporadic start to the new planting season, but the moisture has been welcomed after a dry winter for most. As always, the risk will be that rain continues to fall where plantings eventually become delayed while the driest areas of the country could keep missing out.   Many of the areas where we are getting reports of active planting are the same areas that suffer the most from lingering drought. The large patch of long-term drought spreading from Kansas through eastern Nebraska, northern Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin encompasses a portion of the country that is relatively much further along on planting corn and soybeans.  Across most of the Eastern Corn Belt and down throughout the Southeast, drought is not as much of a concern as is the wetter forecast for the start of the planting season. A drier…

Tesla's Cybertruck sales lost the gas pedal. Almost literally… as sales were put on hold.  Its creator, Elon Musk, may suffer from the greatest case of hubris ever contracted by a genius. The line between genius and madman cycles close and he has been alleged to have crossed it by taking on so many tasks that he can no longer do any of them well. Musk loves the moonshots but his attention seems to drift away to chase after the next bright shiny object that grabs his interest when the unfinished work gets hard on the current one. Tesla has gone from being unable to manufacture enough EV vehicles to satisfy the initial demand of those infatuated with them, to when once filled, additional demand turned out to be less than they expected it would be from the less infatuated. Color me fully un-infatuated. I see Tesla's new truck as the ugliest tin can ever put on 4 wheels. I kept wondering when someone was going to clue Tesla designers in on the fact that they were building an EV ugly duckling but they did not want to hear it. They actually expected to mass produce a near $100,000 model…

My family wrapped up the 23/24 soybean harvest on our farm in Brazil.  Yields came in at about 59 bpa, which is around 10% below APH.    Yields started out promising at the start of harvest but the later planted fields were disappointing.  Considering the ultra-dry start to the season, we came out ok.  When I was at the farm in mid-December, things looked rather bleak.  By the third week of December the rainfall started to pick up again and the crops got caught back up.  We are more of a seed farm than a grain farm and so the quality of the seed means as much or more to us than the quantity of grain produced.  It rained a lot in March as harvest was progressing, which tends to damage germination levels.   Safrinha corn stages are quickly approaching 80% in the pollination to grain fill stage.  Earlier planted corn is "saved" at this point as they are at the ending stage of the crop cycle.  Meanwhile later planted corn is left extremely exposed to the start of the dry season.  The ten-day European forecast shows a giant donut hole forming over Central Brazil, encompassing major second crop corn production…

There is not a neighboring European or country in Asia which has had any interaction with Russia and Russians in their long histories which has not come to regret ever trusting their motives, intentions or words. Russians are about as close today to being the ruthless Vikings of old as exists. They will lie, cheat, steal, kill without aversion to getting whatever their want of the moment turns out to be. What they want is whatever others have that is convenient for them to take. Fins, Poles, Latvians, Georgians, or Ukrainians harbor no illusions over who and what Russians are. They are carrying forth a legacy of empire in which they see themselves as the high caste and the rest of the world their vassals. There is no such thing as an agreement, treaty, armistice or détente that is anything more than a chess move to allow Russia to seek out the next weakness in opponents to exploit. To Russians everyone is an opponent, every breath is taken toward conquest. The collapse of the Soviet Union represented the limits of extension of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe. The Russian Federation under Putin is an attempt at a secondary rally in…

Typically, most watch the US drought monitor but NOAA releases a North American version every two weeks. One can see that while drought has been completely mitigated in the Western US there are still lingering patches of drought in the Heartland. The drought has not been mitigated in Canada while the severe concentrated drought still covers Mexico with no sign of relenting. Where we live in Northwest IA the drought here is gone. Our soil moisture reserves have been fully recharged by late fall, winter and now spring rains so that we are starting the season out with a full tank of subsoil moisture. We got nearly 2 inches of rain last week and for the first time we had excess water standing in fields. More rain is forecast this week so planting will not be as super-early as thought. Additional rain now could actually delay planting and be a negative thing. There are other regions such as in the ECB or Delta where too much rain is a problem. Then there is still Kansas that can be counted upon for drought.   The primary characteristic of the climate setup for 2024 is the transition from El Nino to La…

Grain basis levels have taken on a heightened level of variability this year, showcasing a notable disparity between the country's western and eastern regions. While corn basis remains notably stronger in the West, soybean basis displays relative strength in the East. These discrepancies cannot be solely attributed to supply differentials, given the robust crops witnessed on both sides of the Mississippi River last season. Instead, the driving forces behind the basis differences lie within the dynamics of demand. In the West, firm corn basis is supported by robust ethanol usage, elevated export demand from the Pacific Northwest, and stiff competition within the rail market that draws corn into the Southwest. In the East, soybean basis is bolstered in large part by a wide network of processors that serve a consistent draw from the southeastern poultry sector.   Differences between Illinois and Iowa show the nature of basis being split by region. Country elevators across much of Iowa are posting corn bids against basis that is relatively strong for this point of the season, with a statewide average of 2 cents over the May futures price. At 24 cents under the board, Corn basis in Illinois is closer to its modern…

On the Grains Grains are all still firm in overnight trade as of 6am, but well off overnight highs on word that Israel had attacked some sites in Iran in promised retribution for the weekend barrage. Oil and wheat prices initially spiked much higher but have since given most of the gains back. Why? Because despite promising they would counter even the slightest attack on their territory with a devastating second-wave, Tehran instead declared that the Israeli attack had "failed" (just as theirs had). It's an unfolding drama that could change again by the time you read this. Supportive news for corn comes from continued cuts in Argentina's corn outlook from both the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange and the U.S. Ag attache down there. It also appears EPA will agree today to "temporarily waive" summer restrictions on E15 sales through September 15 after repeated pleas from several senators to do so in light of ongoing energy security risks stemming from war in the Middle East and Ukraine. The most important news this morning is a host of updates on the long-term weather outlook released yesterday by the Climate Prediction Center. The new forecast for May through July calls for above-normal…

Your You/Tube analog gets to know you and tracks podcasts that it thinks that you should see. My chosen one was by David Woo who has been a Wall Street executive and major bank official who now has his own forecasting/investment firm. He lives in Israel and noted that 90% of Israeli's supported finishing Hamas no matter what it took or the geopolitical risk with Iran that it created. They are immersed in the eye for an eye thing and cannot be told when it is time to quit. There is real acrimony and then there are the optics of animosity there. Failure to hit back when attacked leaves the appearance of weakness. Iran's recent drone/missile attack on Israel was in response to one from Israel and was carefully crafted to fit both real acrimony and the optics of animosity necessary in the intended absence of harm and damage that resulted. It was an attack that Iran knew that Israel would thwart. The Saudis, Emirates, and even Jordan assisted in Israel's defense. Israel vowed to respond. Iran said it was 'one and done' but it was not. It immediately began re-supplying missiles to its proxies in preparation for the next…

Brazil's soybean harvest pace is beginning to slow as it nears its conclusion.  We expect Brazil's harvest to reach 90% this week but it may take another month yet to wrap things up completely.  CONAB made a minor adjustment lower to their April soybean production despite finding an additional 140,000 acres by cutting yield a quarter bushel per acre to 48 bpa overall.  This places overall estimates at 146.5 MMT for CONAB while the USDA didn't budge from their March report.  Traders are putting more emphasis on the USDA, pointing out their superior satellite and NDVI technology.   I pointed that out to one trader in Brazil that the USDA has been more accurate in recent years to which he replied, "this time they are wrong."   Even if CONAB and the USDA split the difference, that is still 150+ million bushels removed from Brazil's export supply.   Brazil's exports are the canary in the coal mine.  They are the first to go when there is a lack of supply.  One red flag is that Brazil's soybean exports were down for the month of March compared to last year by 6%.  This would be unusual for the middle of their peak export…

On the Grains Grains are mixed again in overnight trade. There's still no sign of any weather issues with planting, so there is no need to build in any "weather premium" in the minds of traders. That could change tomorrow when the Climate Prediction Center updates its 3-month outlook for May-July. Globally speaking, the only glimmer of supportive news are slightly lower production forecasts for both Ukraine and Russia and ongoing conviction that USDA's estimates for South American soybean and corn crops will inevitably be coming down to more in line with their own estimates down there. Shorter-term, geopolitics and even US politics for that matter are powder kegs of uncertainty that have the U.S. dollar at the highest levels since last fall. The Iranian attack on Israel was a sea change in Tehran's strategy, no longer content to rely on its proxies in the region. For its part, Israel will only say it's going to "respond" and when it does, Tehran says it will strike again. The powder keg in U.S. politics are renewed calls for House Speaker Johnson to resign as he struggles to get support for separate bills to fund new aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.…