Latest / Closing Market Report / Jul 03 | Closing Market Report

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Jul 03 | Closing Market Report · Closing Market Report

• 0:00
  Todd Gleason: From the land to Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market reported. It's the July 2025. I'm extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Matt Bennett from agmarket.net. John Jones, agronomist from the OVAI, will be here to discuss wheat harvest and quality and what he's seeing in corn and soybean fields across the state.
• 0:23
  We'll also hear from plant pathologist Boris Camilletti about tar spot and the weather forecast with Mike Tenure at T Storm Weather on this Thursday edition of the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. December corn for the day settled at $4.37. That was three and a half higher. The March at $4.52 and 3 quarters up 4¢. November beans $10.49 and a quarter up one and a quarter, and the wheat futures for the soft red down five and three quarters today settled at $5.78 and a quarter cents.
• 1:11
  Matt Bennett from agmarket.net now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hi, Matt. Thank you for being with us on this last trading day before the holiday week. In, that is, happy July 4 too.
• 1:24
  Matt Bennett: Oh, absolutely. It's gonna be nice to have a three day weekend as well, Todd.
• 1:28
  Todd Gleason: It may be, but the marketplace seems a little tentative about what might happen over this holiday weekend. I don't recall that fourth of July is one that really changes things very much, but maybe you have a different definition?
• 1:44
  Matt Bennett: Well, I mean, you know, when you look over the past, I mean, clearly, you're you're coming up on pollination. And it seems like, you know, a lot of years in my career, I've seen a little bit of a shift in weather and or sentiment around that fourth of July time frame. Now a lot of times, of course, it's going from a more bullish tone to something a little more bearish. But, obviously, we've had all the bearish stuff we can take for a while here lately. We came in here yesterday.
• 2:13
  We had the Vietnam announcement on trade. You know? And then there's some whispers, if you will. Call them rumors. Call them what you want, you know, that Trump is gonna have some good news in Des Moines this evening when he speaks.
• 2:26
  And so, you know, if that's the case, that he actually does have some good news there, whether it's on the trade front, maybe a deal with China has been kinda floated around there. We don't know if it's true or if it's not. If that's the case, then certainly, you could have some well timed fireworks, you know, coming out of the weekend, especially, you know, if your forecast would shift towards a a warmer, drier type bias. Now the noon maps really didn't look that threatening to most of us, I would say, in my part of the world. And and and, you know, a a good chunk of Illinois is fairly dry right now if we're if we're honest about it.
• 3:05
  You know, that's not the way into the world. Before you get into pollination, we certainly wanna see some rainfall as we go in there, first of all. And then second of all, of course, we're gonna have to get some follow-up. But, yeah, there's gonna be a lot that's gonna be discussed Sunday night. That's for sure.
• 3:19
  Todd Gleason: The president, of course, speaking at the Iowa State Fairgrounds this evening. We'll hear more about that over the weekend, and I'm sure we'll be talking about it on Monday as well and how the trade, resumes, Sunday night into the day trade on Monday. Looking forward into the WASDE and the end of the and I think this may be the more important thing that the president may or may not address this evening. In the month of July, early, the end of the ninety days comes for having these trade deals in place. Two kind of announcements to this point.
• 3:59
  I'm wondering if the trade will begin to worry about the rest of them.
• 4:04
  Matt Bennett: Yeah. I mean, I think the trade is, you know, kinda anxiously awaiting what are we gonna come up with when it comes to China and India. I mean, those are the big ones. And, you know, if if he does come up with some sort of a trade deal there, there's no doubt that it will be met with some enthusiasm. At the same time, we all know the funds have been excessively short.
• 4:24
  You know, we would put them at, you know, probably on the CFTC this afternoon, a 200,000 short position as of Tuesday's close. Now clearly, there was probably some buying that happened yesterday and today. We rallied December corn $15.16 cents. And so clearly that's a big move, at least for what we've seen lately, Todd. And so I think it'd be interesting to kinda see how this plays out, but there's no doubt that this is a very important time of the year.
• 4:55
  Clearly, you have a whole lot in the way of weather that you can digest, but how the market perceives it, in my opinion, it will be very interesting. The next two weeks, I think, are super important. Whether you're talking old corn, new corn, you name it, I think they're very important because if you do get some sort of a threatening weather pattern, I've got to think the funds will lighten up significantly on that short. I just don't think there's gonna be a ton of hedge pressure you know, given that most farmers four thirty seven corn, you know, they probably need a solid 20¢ rally to even start sniffing profitability, you know, unless they just assume a massive yield. And it's probably a little bit early to, you know, assume something wildly above APH, you know, especially in the state of Illinois.
• 5:42
  Todd Gleason: I'm looking forward to talking to you and Arlen Suderman along with Chip Nellinger for our commodity week program. We'll do that in, I don't know, less than an hour or so, and we'll get it posted to the website and folks can hear it tomorrow. Thank you for being with us today.
• 5:55
  Matt Bennett: Oh, thanks for having me, bud.
• 5:56
  Todd Gleason: And of course is Matt Bennett. He is with agmarket.net. We're now joined by Boris Camilletti. He's a plant pathologist for field crops with Extension based on the Urbana Champaign campus of the U of I. Thanks Boris for being with us.
• 6:16
  Farmers particularly, for corn across the state of Illinois and other parts of the Midwest will be worried at this time because of the rainfall that we have had about the development of plant diseases, particularly tar spot, and whether fungicides should be flown on. I take it there are a couple of new tools that are available for producers. Can you walk me first through what the Crop Protection Network is online? People can search for that. It's just Crop Protection Network.
• 6:51
  And then they're going to search for a couple of different tools within that. But start with the Crop Protection Network, please. What is
• 6:58
  Boris Camiletti: Yeah, so the Crop Protection Network is a platform supported by Landgrand University. So every extension plant pathologist in every state, we all meet together and we create tools for farmers. We put all our data from field trials all together, and we create, for example, fungicide efficacy tables. We have one for corn, one for soybean, for foliar diseases, where we have almost every product in the market with a rating for their efficacy in controlling foliar diseases in corn and soybean. As I mentioned, there are two separate tables.
• 7:45
  And we also created now there are new tools there available for farmers. One of them is the Crop Lookout, which is a nice way to see maps with all the counties and all the states in The US, and we can see in real time how the diseases are being reported in the different counties. Then we have another one that is the crop disease forecasting tool, where you just can go, you can put your location, it will take the weather data from the nearest weather station, and will predict the risk for the different diseases in corn and soybean.
• 8:30
  Todd Gleason: Yeah, so the two tools should really be used in concert whisk outing, and together for the tools as well. You're looking for the crop protection network, and then crop lookout or crop protection network and crop disease forecasting. The lookout will give you a map and you can, for instance, click on tar spot and it will show you all of the counties across the whole of The United States or those places that are reporting and where tar spot has been reported already, but you have to double check that by using the crop disease forecaster to see what conditions have been and are going to be like for the development of a disease. In this case, as you explained, Boris, tar spot was already in Warren County, but tar spot that's there, likely if you've scouted for it and didn't find it, is not likely to develop because conditions have changed, and that will this disease forecaster will help you, find that out. Now you do also need to understand something about how the disease works and when it should be sprayed.
• 9:40
  Can you talk about fungicide timing as it's related to tar spot?
• 9:45
  Boris Camiletti: So yeah, so this tool is designed to predict the risk for the disease, but it's also designed to complement the scouting. So it's still really important to scout the fields to see if you have the disease, and more importantly, to see if the disease is progressing over time. If that is the case, for example, and you have tar spot, and you see that it is there and it's developing, it's progressing, the disease incidence is increasing from one week to the other one, you may start thinking about fungicide sprays. So, if the crop is still at delayed vegetative stages, it's very rare to see an economic benefit from that spray, so it has to be an extraordinary situation. If you are from VT R1 to R3, and if in any of those stages you see that the disease is progressing, it's very likely that you will see an economic benefit from fungicide application.
• 10:49
  But the situation can be tricky. For example, if you are in VTR1 and you do your first spray, you may also consider that you will need a second spray if the disease is still there by the time that the fungicide is gone. We know that the fungicides, the protection window is usually two to three weeks. But, for example, if you don't have any conditions for the disease, the risk is very low, you don't see that the disease is progressive and you feel and you are at BT, R1 or R2, you may want to wait until you have the conditions for the disease before doing a spray. If you can skip and spray and then you get the disease and you are at R3, for example, you can do your fungicide application and you won't need a second spray later.
• 11:44
  In that way, we can save one fungicide application. If the disease arrives late in the field, for example, at R4, it has to be very severe to see an economic benefit from that spray. And then at R5 and R6, even when the disease arrives and develops and doesn't look good, it will not impact the yield, so you won't see any benefit from the spread at that time.
• 12:12
  Todd Gleason: Yeah, thank you much. I really appreciate the explanations and the tools.
• 12:16
  Boris Camiletti: Yeah, thank you. Anytime.
• 12:17
  Todd Gleason: Boris Camilletti is the Extension field crops plant pathologist based on the Urbana Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. I used the tools just this morning to check and see whether tar spot was present in Logan County. It was not. I looked to see what the risk might be for development. It was high during the June and nearly nil at this point, and there's no tar spot present according to my brothers who scouted earlier today.
• 12:49
  I also checked the Northwestern Part Of Indiana because there has been tar spot reported there. The same thing goes for the risk. It was high in June, but if it's not in your field now, it's unlikely to develop at this time. I also checked in with John Jones, soil fertility specialist agronomist here on campus this morning to see how he had been interpreting what he's seen at the field across the state. We'll start with him as it's related to wheat harvest and quality.
• 13:21
  John Jones: It's been a good progress in terms of wheat harvest. I think things started to dry down pretty fast, and we moved into that that kind of ready to go mode for for getting combines running and getting the wheat cut. The the trials that we've had kind of moving up from Southern Illinois into Central Illinois and Piatt County area have been yielding fairly impressively for the expected amount of disease pressure we might've seen in some of the areas with wet springs. Some of our higher yielding fields and treatments are well above one hundred and one hundred sixteen, even up to mid to high 120s in terms of yield. And then the quality has been pretty good with test weights well above 60 in some cases.
• 14:06
  When following, many of the combines are being followed with planters getting beans in the ground. There was a few really timely rains that hopefully got in after the soybeans got in the ground that should really push emergence and eventually be able to get those beans off to a good start. So really fortunate for that in many cases, if you were fortunate enough to get that rain. Although when looking in the profile and we were just out soil sampling yesterday for some research, certainly is quite dry in many cases as you move central and northern part of the state. And so at least we're getting a little bit of a wetting front that's moving down.
• 14:44
  That'll help as we start to move into tassel and kind of peak water uptake for corn. Naturally, as the water is moving to those roots and throughout the soil, our nitrogen is as well. So late season and availability will be really tied to how well that water is moving to where those roots have effectively got down in the soil profile. Something that's came up more recently, around around the state, has just been questions and concerns about some areas of soybeans not looking the best that that maybe deal to due to iron deficiency chlorosis in some fields where we are confirming that there's an appreciable amount of carbonate in the soil surface. So if that is the case, there are some options.
• 15:27
  Your best option is really variety selection. And then if that field is due for drainage updates or something like that, that could be an option as well. Usually either chelated or non chelated iron products have an ability to green up tissue pretty fast, but rarely translate to yield response. We have seen very few instances of that. So it's something to manage more at the beginning of the year when thinking about varieties that have good IDC scores.
• 15:57
  Those are the kind of wheat, corn and soybean updates and things that I've been talking with farmers in the last, we'll say, three or four days.
• 16:04
  Todd Gleason: That's John Jones. He is an extension soil fertility specialist agronomist here on the Urbana Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. Mike Tanure, president and CEO at t storm weather, that's tstorm.net online, is now here to take a look at the forecast for the growing regions across the planet and what the climate has been like. Thank you, Mike, for taking some time with us. Here in the middle part of the country in The United States, the Corn Belt, we've had an awfully good growing season so far.
• 16:48
  There were worries partway through this season about how much rainfall had come in some places. Others were a little on the dry side, particularly out west. A lot of that has been alleviated at this point. Can you give me your assessment of what the next, I don't know, five to ten days might look like across the Corn Belt?
• 17:10
  Mike Tannura: Well, absolutely. I mean, 8% of US corn production was drier than normal over the last thirty days, and that's a very low number. So it just highlights what you've been saying, which is that conditions are looking pretty good at the moment. Some of that dryness is actually scattered in Eastern Iowa and Illinois. That does account for most of it.
• 17:28
  So right here locally we could use some rain, but for the most part the general consensus for The United States is that things are looking really good right now. As we move forward, there's more rain on the way for the Northwest half of corn and soybeans over the next week. Two cool fronts are going to move through and a couple of waves of energy, and that's a recipe for thunderstorms. So it's not going to be a super wet period because these storms are going to be scattered. But we think that over the next week, we'll see three quarters of an inch to one and a half inches for that northwest half of the crop.
• 18:01
  Now the Southeast half, includes some of these dry areas around Illinois, but also some of the wet areas of the Mid South, there's not going to be a whole lot of rain over the next five to seven days. We will see a pretty nice thunderstorm cluster tonight and into tomorrow in Wisconsin and potentially Northern Illinois, but we don't think that's going to be a widespread event. It'll be kind of a localized event for maybe 5% of US corn and soybeans. But beyond that, there's just not a whole lot out there because all those fronts that we talked about earlier are going to dissipate before they reach the Eastern Corn Belt and the Mid South. That will change though once we get into the middle of next week.
• 18:37
  Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we think the setup is pretty decent for thunderstorms in these drier areas. So in the end, by the time we get through next Friday, so basically a little more than a week out, we think that most corn and soybeans will have received that similar amount of three quarters of an inch to one and a half inches of rain. And, Todd, that's a pretty average rainfall number for this time of the year for that period of time.
• 19:01
  Todd Gleason: What do you think the impact on let's start with the corn crop might be of the weather to that point in time?
• 19:07
  Mike Tannura: Well, rainfall at this time of the year is the number one determinant of yield. And if we do get these rains, it might not make for a monster crop. That'll still depend on what happens later on. But it will at least give you some more time for things to stay favorable. And even if they were to turn a little bit dry later on this month, it would at least prevent some of these real dry scenarios from happening.
• 19:29
  Historically, there's been a number of July's in the Corn Belt where different states saw less than an inch of rain. So it immediately take all those super dry years right off the record, and those super dry years are generally the worst yielding years. Maybe not a big surprise, but we wouldn't have a terrible crop. One thing we do need to watch is that it will be a little bit warmer than normal going forward. We know we'll see some heat over the next three to five days.
• 19:55
  That will break once we get into next week. And even though temperatures are a little bit unclear seven to ten days from now, it doesn't look like it'll be unusually warm. If anything, it'll be normal or even a little bit cool. So all in all, Todd, this is just telling us that things are looking pretty good for corn right now, but we don't want to get too far ahead of everything. It really depends on how this pattern lasts.
• 20:19
  If it lasts just for next week and then that's it and suddenly it turns hot and dry, well then we have to think about things a little bit differently. But just from where it stands now and where it looks like we're going through next week, there's just not a ton to worry about.
• 20:31
  Todd Gleason: Is there a different story being written for soybean?
• 20:34
  Mike Tannura: Soybeans would like to see a lot of rain, and they've certainly seen a lot of rain over the last month. And because of that, the pressure on the soybean crop is also pretty low. We would like to see big rains in July and especially in August. The rains that we have coming up are pretty close to normal, so this is not the type of situation where that's it for the season. That'll be enough to get you through, but it will be enough to at least buy you more time for more rains to follow-up.
• 21:02
  For the soybean crop, they're not as sensitive right now. They're also not as sensitive to temperatures in general, so there's not a lot of concerns over soybeans yet. That would only change once we knew more about weather later this month, and especially next month, which is still four weeks out. So, you know, the soybean story is pretty much on a holding pattern just like corn.
• 21:23
  Todd Gleason: One last item for the day. Can you check-in on the corn growing regions of Europe for me? How are they doing?
• 21:30
  Mike Tannura: Well, France is in a long term drought. It hasn't rained there much in recent months, and they've been way warmer than normal for a while. And that very warm and dry pattern is certainly going to continue across Western Europe going forward, and that will likely have an impact on their corn. Now keep in mind, Europe only produces about 60,000,000 metric tons of corn compared to The US at around 400. So this is kind of like the entire continent being a little bit bigger than Illinois.
• 21:55
  So this is not a monster producer by any means, but this is a major weather situation that they're in. There's not much rain on the way. It's going to stay way warmer than normal. Their corn is turning sensitive. And most of these same things apply to sunflowers as well, and they're a much larger producer of sunflowers to the world than they are to corn.
• 22:16
  So this is something to watch, and it's probably going to be a story where it'll be difficult for them to have a real nice big crop because of this. And so we'll just keep watching that. But the forecast here is a little bit more straightforward, and that we can see that the heat is just going to continue, and there's not really a whole lot of rain on the way there.
• 22:33
  Todd Gleason: Thank you much, Mike.
• 22:34
  Mike Tannura: Thank you, Todd.
• 22:35
  Todd Gleason: Mike Tenurez with tstormweather@tstorm.net online. The markets have closed now through Sunday evening in observance of the July 4 holiday. We will have our commodity week program running in the closing market report or this slot tomorrow right here on these radio stations. Be sure to tune in then or find it online at willag.org and look for commodity week or in your favorite podcast applications. You have a great July 4 weekend.
• 23:06
  I'm Illinois Extensions, Todd Gleason.