Latest / Closing Market Report / Oct 28 | Closing Market Report
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- cmr261028 The October 28, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report provides updates on commodity markets, alternative bioenergy crops, and global agricultural weather. Greg Johnson analyzes recent corn and soybean price declines driven by fund liquidation, while Andy VanLoocke details the agronomic behavior, nitrogen storage cycles, and commercial bioenergy applications of Miscanthus. Meteorologist Drew Lerner concludes with weather forecasts impacting near-term harvest progress in the U.S. Corn Belt and early-season planting conditions across South America. 00:31 Ag Markets with Greg Johnon, TGM Total Grain Marketing 06:23 Summit Explores Miscanthus Agronomy and Bioenergy Use 16:02 Ag Weather with Drew Lerner, World Weather Inc. --- Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 28th day of October 2026. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason. Coming up, we’ll talk about the commodity markets with Greg Johnson and the weather forecast with Drew Lerner. We’ll also hear again from the first annual International Summit on Miscanthus on this Wednesday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media. Find us online at willag.org. 00:31 Ag Markets with Greg Johnson, TGM Total Grain Marketing Todd Gleason: Greg Johnson from TGM, that’s totalgrainmarketing.com, now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hi, Greg, thanks for being with us. Start with what you think the impact this week has been in the marketplace and how farmers are viewing it for both corn and soybeans. Greg Johnson: Well, the funds continue to liquidate some of their extremely long positions. We’ve lost over a dollar in corn since the September high. December corn was trading at $5.50 the first of September, and now we’re at $4.50, so basically, that’s an 18% drop. Most people think that should be enough, but yet we continue to go lower and making new lows for the move. Today, we’re trying to bounce once again, up a couple of cents, but we’ve tried that a couple of times and have failed to establish much of a bounce yet. So, funds continue to liquidate. In the soybean pit, there’s a little bit more psychologically negative news with the election down in Brazil over the weekend and the more conservative candidate losing. That has weakened their stock market, it’s weakened their currency. The thought process, I think, among some of the traders was that that would obviously make beans cheaper for export and that their exports would pick up. We haven’t seen that happen yet, but psychologically it could, so we’ll have to keep an eye on that. Soybeans have also lost a dollar since their September 10th high. We were at $13.35, now we’re at $12.35. So a dollar move down, just like in corn, but percentage-wise that’s only a 7% drop in soybean prices versus the 18% drop in corn. And if that’s not bad enough, we can look at the wheat market. The wheat market has dropped $1.90 since the first of September. That’s a 24% decline in prices. So everything’s been lower, funds have been liquidating. They still maintain a fairly long position in both corn and soybeans. Will they liquidate more of that, or is this enough? There have been some new short positions established amongst the funds, so some of the funds think that we could go even lower, obviously. But then others are looking at the big picture, the longer haul, and I think they’ll hold on. Bottom line is, since the first of September basically, the funds have taken some profit, and the markets have gone down as a result. Todd Gleason: Is much still coming into the elevator? Greg Johnson: I’d say we’re 99% done with beans. We’ve got a few double-crop beans left to come in. Yields have been tremendous on soybeans. I think Champaign County’s previous record was 74.2 set back in 2021. I think we will easily eclipse that. I’m using 77 bushels for the Champaign County average. Just an anecdote to kind of verify that: two people have told me that had double-crop beans that planted the beans after the wheat harvest, the double-crop beans made almost 60 bushels to the acre. And that’s just unheard of. I mean, 40 to 45 is usually what you hope for with double-crop beans, and two people were up to 60. So those August rains not only added to the double-crop beans, but they added to the regular beans as well. I think that accounts for the big production in the soybeans. On corn, I think we’re about 80% done here in east-central Illinois. Unfortunately, the yields are not as good. Where we had good, well-drained soils and not heavy, heavy rains, the corn is making 250, which is down 20 bushels from last year. But in those areas that either were low ground, weren’t well-tiled, or just had 10 inches after 7 inches after 4 inches of rain, those areas are in the 160 to 220 area, which is down 30 bushels. So if you take down 30 on the poor ground and down 20 on the good ground, that’s 25 bushels. I think Champaign County is down about 25 bushels from last year. Todd Gleason: Do you suppose that the USDA clearly probably has found this? How big of an area do you actually think that might be across the Corn Belt? Because they’re still using good-sized numbers for Iowa, Nebraska, of course, up. I know it feels like there should be a lot more of that across the nation, but it seems like there isn’t. Greg Johnson: Well, and I hesitate to try to extrapolate. I always tell farmers, don’t market based on what you have out your own back door. You have to look at this not only nationally but globally. So, I have no doubt that the yields are down in central Illinois and northern Illinois, but I’m not speaking for Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Indiana, or some of the other big states. It very well could be there. I still think the USDA for Illinois at 208 is a little too high. I think that’s probably closer to 204 or 205. But again, if the other states don’t come down, a few bushel decline in the state of Illinois isn’t a reason to all of a sudden be bullish on corn. All I can say is that here in central Illinois and people that I talk to in northern Illinois, in those areas that got the heavy rains in the summer, we’re down 20 to 25 bushels. Todd Gleason: Hey, thank you much, Greg. I appreciate it. Greg Johnson: Thank you, Todd. Todd Gleason: That’s Greg Johnson. He is with TGM, that’s totalgrainmarketing.com. 06:23 Summit Explores Miscanthus Agronomy and Bioenergy Use Todd Gleason: I’m University of Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason, here at the first annual Miscanthus Summit that’s taking place on campus all week this week. There are folks from all over the planet here, but we’re going to talk with somebody a little closer to home from Iowa State University in Ames. Andy VanLoocke is here. He is a meteorologist; however, he has been studying Miscanthus and how this plant interacts with the environment and the weather systems in particular. Thank you, Andy, for being here. What caused you to follow this path? Andy VanLoocke: That’s right. Actually, my story starts here at the U of I. So, I was an undergraduate intern doing research at the Illinois State Water Survey—it’s been changed institutionally since then—and I was doing a research project on lake effect snow of all things out here in Illinois, because there was a scientist focused on that. While I was at that institute, I came across Carl Bernacchi, who would end up being my PhD advisor, was working on the water use of plants under elevated CO2 concentrations at the SoyFACE facility here just off of campus. They had some Miscanthus plotted out front as demonstration plots started by Emily Heaton, and when we drove by, I was like, “Well, how much water does that use?” And that was the beginning of my PhD. Todd Gleason: And what do you do at Iowa State? Andy VanLoocke: I’m an agricultural meteorologist, and so I study interactions between the cropping systems we put out in place and the weather and climate that is going on around us, and actually how the crops themselves influence the atmosphere. Todd Gleason: And how do you study this particular plant, Miscanthus? Andy VanLoocke: So we’ve got about six field locations where we study it under different conditions, one where we monitor the heck out of it, where we have a system called eddy covariance, similar to a system we have here at the University of Illinois, that measures the fluctuations of carbon dioxide, temperatures, and CO2 ten times per second. So, during this interview, we will have collected thousands of observations of the transfer of energy and mass from the crop to the atmosphere and back and forth. Again, still green right now, so it’s still taking up carbon. But the other systems we have around it, the soybeans are done, they’ve been harvested, and the cover crops planted are just trying to catch up to what the Miscanthus is doing in the last few weeks before we get our hard frost. Todd Gleason: What are you trying to find out? What are you looking to explore, and I know sometimes it’s exploring for just exploring purposes. Andy VanLoocke: So we want to know what we can expect for the yield, first and foremost. Every time you grow a crop in a new location with new weather and a new climate, you need to know what you can expect to be able to harvest because that’s going to be the economic component of the crop. The next thing we want to know is how it got there, right? So if we look at fluctuations in carbon uptake with weather and climate, we do a better job of estimating what the yield might be in another year and another time or another location that has similar sorts of patterns. Todd Gleason: One of the issues with this crop is the older it gets, the less it yields. I assume this is one of the things you’re trying to solve or figure out why it happens. Andy VanLoocke: Yeah, and actually, the data we’ve collected can push back on that just a little bit. So, much like you and I, we probably hit our peak in our teens or so, or maybe early twenties, and then maybe decline a little bit in whatever sort of physical output you want to measure. But you know, we’re not slowing down that much, I don’t think, and we can still get the job done in most situations. Miscanthus is sort of like that as well. It hits its peak in its second or third year, goes down in its fourth or fifth year, and a lot of the studies that were published in the first decade or so out of the United States basically, that’s as far as they got. They published their results, and for some other reasons with funding sources and the interest from the Renewable Fuel Standard, a lot of it just sort of died off and got left at, well, looks like it’s going to keep going off. We kept our experiments going. They’re still here, they’re still producing biomass, and after 15-plus years, they’ve kind of stabilized at a level that is about two-thirds of their maximum productivity without an obvious decline over time. If the stand’s been damaged—you had a big terrible winter or some other factors have come in and caused some stress to the system—those ones might be a little depressed. But the steady state is actually pretty stable over time after 10-plus years. Todd Gleason: We know that plant nutrients are important to the plant, it keeps it going. I’m wondering about the perennial side of this. For instance, with corn, we know as it relates to nitrogen that the plant takes it up, it gets stored in the plant itself, it translocates that into the ear at the end of the year during grain fill, which is really important. It is a nitrogen source that does come from the soil, but it’s actually being stored in the plant and then moved late in the season. The rhizome is important here with Miscanthus because it stores nitrogen, and it moves this out of the plant all winter long. So there’s this balance that has to take place for the nitrogen storage that comes out of a plant that’s still standing—it is a grass like corn. How do you look at that function and try to think of it as part of the cropping system? Andy VanLoocke: That’s right, so we actually think of the rhizome like the soil in this case. There’s a store of organic nitrogen in the soil that gets mineralized by microbes. That still happens in a Miscanthus stand, it has roots in soil and that sort of thing, but it has that other store that effectively, the ear that you mentioned in corn, is below ground in this rhizome. The nutrients move into that organ, and in corn, it’s seed, and we remove it before it can actually propagate its next generation. In Miscanthus, it’s below ground, and that’s its storage for overwinter. And the nitrogen comes back from there before the roots can really get going, before there’s enough movement of water to take up nitrogen from the soil, it uses its internal storage organ to get things started, to get the ground covered, to outcompete weeds, start taking up light, start getting the fuel for the fire for photosynthesis, get the roots growing, and then the mineralization kicks in and it can grow off of the soil resources that are there. So in some cases, we’ve gone 15 years without fertilizing, adding any nitrogen to our cropping system for Miscanthus, and it seems to keep up just on the internal cycling and the nutrients from the soil. We’ve got one location that’s run out of steam, and it has a low potential mineralization rate, so if you went out and did your late spring nitrate test like you do in a corn system, we’d be testing real low there. So that’s one location that we need to add probably 70 or 80 pounds to keep up with the crop demand. Todd Gleason: Do you suppose that Miscanthus is—because you’re balancing when I take this crop off, when I harvest it, and you’re balancing that between the fertilizer side, in this case, the nitrogen into the rhizome, and when you can harvest—is there anything that causes you to say, “Well, it’s better further north, it’s a better crop further south,” based on the movement of the fertilizer, in this case, the nitrogen into the rhizome, and when you can harvest? Andy VanLoocke: Yeah, so what we found is once the killing frost happens, something that would cause your herbaceous plants in your garden to maybe stop off—Miscanthus will go through a couple of those, it’s when you’re getting down 27 Fahrenheit for an entire night that really tends to kill it all the way off. Once that happens, that process really slows down, and then the nutrient kind of pauses where it is. So if that happens too early before the development of the plant can get it down to the rhizome, that could cause some issues, it doesn’t get there for the next year. Luckily, it usually stores two or three years’ worth of nitrogen down there, so that can happen once every few years and it’ll probably be fine. But if it happens way too early, that can cause long-term issues. Now, what we also found is in places that don’t experience a frost or a hard killing freeze at all, actually, Miscanthus doesn’t do as well in, like, Florida, southern Mississippi, and some of the southern Alabama sites because that’s kind of a key signal, like a hardening frost that you would see in your fruiting crops that are perennial. If it doesn’t have that, it actually doesn’t go through the life cycle the way that it does here further north. So, Tennessee tends to do just fine, northern Alabama, northern Georgia, but as you get down to the places that don’t experience a frost some years, down to that new climate zone, that’s when things get a little bit tricky, actually, for the version that we’ve been growing here in Illinois. Todd Gleason: Finally, something just of interest that Emily Heaton mentioned in passing. She’s the organizer, or one of the organizers of the event on campus, the summit that you’re attending, that Iowa State cogenerates heat or electricity, I’m not sure, on campus. Andy VanLoocke: So it’s actually at the University of Iowa, so you know, for the folks in Iowa, that’s a sensitive topic, but we’re happy to collaborate with them. So the University of Iowa grows around a thousand acres of Miscanthus—well, not the university, the farmers that live in proximity, there’s about a thousand acres of private land growing Miscanthus. The University of Iowa pelletizes that Miscanthus and puts it in their power plant. They’ve actually replaced coal with co-fired pellets now. So, for the first time last year, I believe it was, Iowa has a podcast about this actually on Emily’s Biomass Innovation Hub website. But basically, they are no longer using coal. They’ve replaced it with these pelletized Miscanthus and, of course, some natural gas. They didn’t completely offset the coal with the biomass material, but they’ve increased the use of that over the years. Todd Gleason: Yay Hawkeyes, I suppose. Andy VanLoocke: Ouch. Todd Gleason: Hey Andy, thank you so much. Andy VanLoocke: Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. Todd Gleason: Andy VanLoocke is with Iowa State University. He’s based in Ames. 16:02 Ag Weather with Drew Lerner, World Weather Inc. Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention now to the weather forecast. Drew Lerner is here, he is with World Weather, Incorporated in Kansas City. Hello, Drew. Thank you for being with us. I’d like today, rather than starting in the Corn Belt where the harvest has been moving really, really well, to take a look at South America a bit more in-depth and the beginning of their growing season from Argentina through Brazil. What do we know about it so far? Drew Lerner: Yeah, well, you know, from an Argentina perspective, the growing season so far has been just about ideal. There’s been some dryness around in the west-central and northwestern areas, but it’s also been a cool spring for Argentina, and so the demand for moisture has been kept relatively low. And so the dryness has not been a big issue, and there has been timely rain in the primary winter wheat production areas and in a large part of their more important corn and soybean areas. So I think Argentina is poised to do well. They do need rain in the northwest, but that is kind of a minor production area, and they could do a whole lot better if it comes on in November. So I think there’s still time for that. Now, Brazil, it’s an interesting situation there. Everyone is aware of the El Niño influence, and El Niño has had a very strong influence on Brazil since it really first began early in our summer. The anomalies typically are above-normal precipitation in southern Brazil and somewhat below-normal precipitation in the northeast, and sometimes erratic rain in center-west. Now, looking at the moisture profile today, we are definitely very wet in the south, but the center-west crop areas are at a crossroads right now. The ground has firmed up a lot; the northern part of Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, and Goiás are quite dry right now, both in the top and subsoil. Now, the early planted crops got in the ground at a really good time, and the crop got off to a fairly good start, but it is definitely too dry now for that crop with the short root system. So it has to rain, and it needs to rain generally and right away. The forecast is going to support scattered showers and thunderstorms over the next 10 days. The thing that we’re worried about is that the rain may be light and it may be erratic, so that some areas will do better than others. We definitely don’t see a general soaking for that whole region, but there should be enough rain for all the crops in the area to at least temporarily improve. Now, the key here is looking down the road in weeks two and three, it looks like the precipitation pattern is going to become erratic and light, definitely below normal once again, and it’s going to be warmer. So that means that there’s a lot of pressure on this 10-day period coming up in front of us here, we’ve got to get some decent rain into the ground to carry these crops through that next drier period. So it could be an interesting couple of weeks here for the center-west. Outside of that, northeast Brazil is doing okay for this time of the year, their seasonal rains really kick in later in November and December, and so far they’re okay for now. Todd Gleason: In the United States, of course, start with the Corn Belt, how harvest will proceed. Looks like there’s going to be some rainfall next week, and then we probably should talk about the southwest and the Delta as well. Drew Lerner: Yes, for the corn and soybean producing areas, we’ve had a really good stretch of weather for most places, and that is going to come to an end, as you alluded to. We do have a couple of storm systems, first a cold front that will cut through the region, and then an upper-level cut-off low-pressure system will move through the area and finally be chased out by another frontal system. So over the next 8 to 10 days, there will be three different rain events that will move through parts of the Midwest, causing a little bit of disruption to farming activity. I think we’ve made good progress up to now, and we still have a couple of good days ahead of us yet. For the Delta and the southeast, well, they’ve been fairly dry here recently, but they will start getting some rain this weekend into next week, and I think that’ll ease the minds of some of the wheat producers down that way because it has been awfully dry here recently. But I don’t have to go too long to remind everyone that it is an El Niño year, and the southeastern US and probably the Delta will end up pretty wet by the time we get through the middle of the winter, so we’re not terribly concerned about the seriousness of the dryness there. For the southwest, in particular hard red winter wheat country, we’re back into a more frequent precipitation pattern starting tomorrow, and it will last for about eight days. We’ll see at least two and probably three rounds of rain for most of the region, and so the crop is going to be adequately fed with moisture, and the establishment still looks pretty good. Temperatures are going to be a little bit cooler, but definitely above the norm for this time of the year. Todd Gleason: A quick note on Europe? Drew Lerner: You know, Europe, the North Sea region, United Kingdom, and parts of France and Germany, all of that region received some decent rain this past weekend and really helped to moisten up the topsoil. Now I say decent; it was well distributed, call it light to moderate. It wasn’t enough to fix long-term drought or subsoil moisture, so a temporary improvement and winter crop establishment will likely occur as a result of that, but we’re back into a dry weather mode now for that area, and I do not expect to see much in the way of well-organized precipitation for another 10 days. So hopefully, the crops there will have had enough moisture to get along a little bit better, but follow-up precipitation will be a must. Todd Gleason: Anything from the Black Sea? Drew Lerner: You know, Russia’s southern region had a really good start to their winter planting season, but that was weeks ago, and the weather since then has been fairly dry, and the crop does need a good drink of water. We’ve been warmer than normal, so the crop has been stimulated to keep on trucking, but there’s not much moisture to truck with. So the need for rain is pretty high, and they’ve got to squeeze it in here fairly quickly because it is going to start turning too cool for crop development in another couple of weeks, few weeks I would say. So that area will need to be watched. And of course, the Danube River basin in eastern Europe is still quite dry, especially from Slovakia through Hungary into Serbia and Romania. Those areas need a good drink too, it’s been very dry. Todd Gleason: Hey, thank you much, Drew. Drew Lerner: You bet, have a good week. Todd Gleason: You too. That’s Drew Lerner, he is with World Weather, Incorporated in Kansas City. Helps us to wrap up this Wednesday edition of the Closing Market Report. It came to you from Illinois Public Media; it is public radio for the farming world, online on-demand at willag.org. I’m Extension’s Todd Gleason.