It’s been difficult to find some support in the grain markets, especially during the 2026 harvest. Bryan Doherty, senior market advisor for Total Farm Marketing, said it’s been hard to “feed the bull” recently.
“We don’t have much to feed the bull. Prices are moving lower, so demand should increase, right, on that expectation. But what you’re seeing right now is a continuation of what we have been seeing for several days, and it looks to me like the managed money is just too long. The market has been too long, record-long, and if you don’t feed the bull, it starts to tip over. You start to see an exodus. It was estimated that 17,000 contracts exited yesterday, and just the way the market trades, I see the market try to come back, and then it goes lower. Try and come back and goes lower. I think those are a wave of sell orders that are just being sort of eaten up by the market, but it pressures prices.”
There are other factors pressuring commodity prices.
“You got a good week of harvest pressure. Big picture, got a U.S. dollar that has rallied the last six weeks, and then you’ve got again this flow of corn that was contracted earlier in the year at higher prices. That’s all hitting the pipeline. So, you kind of put all those variables together, and it’s just creating a pretty tough environment.”
He talked about the yield results coming in from farmers around rural America.
“I would say the first 30 percent of the crop that was harvested, I would say probably seven or eight out of 10 farmers told me their yields weren’t as good as last year, or they were below expectations, or even below their APH. I’d say that number is starting to shift a little bit closer to as expected, or a little bit less than expected. Still not last year, but certainly not a train wreck. And that’s just a function of a lot of farmers in parts of the Midwest getting moving, in particular where the rated corn was pretty good in sections of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. We’re hearing some good numbers in those regions.”
It looks like corn is going into storage while farmers are selling soybeans off the combine.
“So, as I’m talking to farmers, the only ones I hear that are really anxious to sell anything right now might have a little bit of overrun. Otherwise, it’s a scenario where it looks like a lot of corn is going to get buttoned up pretty tight. Still, there’s always risk with storing, right? So, what are some of those risks? One of the risks is with higher interest rates. What does it cost from an interest rate perspective to store corn? So that could sway some farmers who are on the fence on corn storage, at least whether they want to store or not. Soybeans, I think, just the overrun or the good yield numbers we’re hearing have farmers selling extra inventory. I would say, in my long 38-year career, farmers are not really anxious to store a lot of beans. They’d rather move the beans and save the storage space for corn.”