It’s been a bit of a rough go in the corn market recently. John Heinberg, a market advisor with Total Farm Marketing, said the grain markets are stuck in sell-off mode.
“Obviously, the markets are not in great shape with the way we’ve been selling off the grains here the last couple of weeks. Now, as we’ve taken a lot of the bullish news out of the marketplace in that regard, so, but again, it’s just a difficult time right now, and seasonality is also a big play in this market right at this time frame. We’re running out of bullish news, and then throw on top of that, the weather is not a concern here at this time frame.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some weather concerns in parts of rural America.
“I know we’re getting a lot of rain in some areas, and that does have some concerns to it, but you know, again, in the bigger picture, for every guy that’s got water issues, there are 30 guys who are happy. Remember, it was just a couple of years ago we lost over a couple of hundred thousand acres in South Dakota due to flooding, and we still popped up a near-record or record crop. So, again, it’s early, and I feel for guys in those situations with these storms that are coming through.”
Corn is feeling a lot of pressure because the large South American harvest.
“Some of it is just the competition that’s out there globally for corn at this time frame. This is the second year in a row we basically saw about the first part of May that we kind of put a bit of a recovery high, or in this case, it was a high in, and then we just saw the market really roll over, and I think a lot of that is more tied to what’s going on with South American bushels. The USDA report, the biggest move in that report was the raising of the Argentine crop up, and the raising of the Brazilian crop up. They added nine million metric tons to the global balance sheet. Now that actually got the USDA kind of in line with where the rest of the world thinks those crops are.”
The corn market is primarily going to be watching the weather going forward in the rest of the summer.
“It’s all going to be about weather. We got the acre number coming at the end of the month. We’ll see what happens with that. We’re going to be down corn acres from last year, but is it up a little bit from where we were in March? We’ll have to see. Same thing with the soybean side as well. And then, after we get through that report on the 30th of June, it’s all going to be about weather and where we are there.”