Ag Markets Update: April 22-30
Corn planting has accelerated in the last week with planted acres now at 27% complete. This is 7% ahead of the normal pace and well ahead of where we were at this time in 2019. Still ahead of last year’s pace, the acres planted in the Eastern Corn Belt is lagging behind the rest of the country as they are stuck in a wet and cool weather pattern slowing their efforts to get in the field. As you can see from RJO’Brien’s U.S. Corn Planting Progress, the leading corn planted states are: MN at 40% IA at 39% IL at ...
The return of the AG
We’ve talked recently about African Swine Flu sending the Hog market for a ride, and that’s just the sort of thing we imagined in our 2019 Outlook whitepaper when we talked about the “return of Ag.” There’s been four straight years of volatility contraction for the Ag markets, and there’s a real threat that the increasingly connected global food supply and increase in the volatility of the weather causes some outlier moves in Ag markets. Enter Bloomberg, with their Pessimist’s Guide to 2019: Fire, Floods, and Famine, a sort of worst case scenario they imagined where record forest fires, bigger ...
The ‘right twice a day clock’ that is gold.
We have long been in the Warren Buffet camp in relation to Gold: “Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” Gold sort of acts like the proverbial clock that is right twice a day, and (which is rarely said) wrong the other 1,438 minutes. Gold Bugs were finally proven right for 10 years between 2001 and 2011, after waiting for a dozen or more ...
The Chinese trade war is affecting American soybeans
Sure is tough to be an American farmer these days, with headlines like this popping up around President Trump’s ongoing trade war with the Chinese: Nowhere is this pain being felt more than in the Soybean market, which is the second largest financially important crop in the U.S., with $41 Billion with soybeans grown in 2017 behind Corn at $48 billion. China is the world’s biggest importer and America’s largest customer in a trade worth $14 billion in 2017. But while it makes for a good headline, that 42-year-low was only about 10% lower than where the market had been ...
