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Aug 13 | Closing Market Report · Closing Market Report

• cmr260813 The August 13, 2026, broadcast of the Closing Market Report examines recent commodity market trends, edge-of-field conservation technologies, and weather-related crop stress. Dave Chatterton analyzes the corn market's response to lower-than-expected USDA yield estimates, highlighting the negative impact of sustained high overnight temperatures on grain fill and competitive pressures from Argentine exports. Rabin Bhattarai outlines the mechanics and environmental benefits of woodchip bioreactors and drainage water management systems, which mitigate nitrate runoff and optimize field water retention. Finally, meteorologist Mike Tannura discusses the agronomic effects of current weather patterns, emphasizing that while recent rainfall has been largely adequate, unusually warm overnight temperatures are significantly reducing crop productivity across the Corn Belt. 01:47 Dave Chatterton, Strategic Farm Marketing 08:08 Two Edge of Field Conservation Practices 16:13 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm.net --- Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana, Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It’s the 13th day of August 2026. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason. Coming up, we’ll talk about the commodity markets. Not with Matt Bennett, he’s out of the office this afternoon, but rather with Dave Chatterton of Strategic Farm Marketing. Then we’ll turn our attention to edge-of-field conservation practices. There was a field day outside of Cisco, Illinois, today. I attended and talked to a member of the agricultural and biological engineering team right here on this campus. And then, as we close out our time together, we’ll take a look at the weather forecast, too, with Mike Tannura at T-storm Weather. That’s tstorm.net online right here on Illinois Public Media’s Closing Market Report. It is public radio for the farming world. announce: Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. Todd Gleason: September corn for the day settled $4.48, down 9. December at $4.72, 8 and 3/4 lower. And the March at $4.87 and 3/4, 8 and 3/4 lower as well. September beans, 3/4 higher, $11.66 the settlement price. November, $11.82 and a quarter, down 1. January down a penny and a quarter at $11.97 and 3/4. Bean meal off $1.10. The bean oil 37 cents lower. December soft red winter wheat, $6.68 and a quarter, a penny and a half lower. The hard red December down 3 cents. It finished at $7.34 and 3/4 of a cent. Live cattle futures, $3.75 lower at $220 and a nickel. Feeder cattle down $2.15, and lean hogs down $1.42 and a half. 01:47 Dave Chatterton, Strategic Farm Marketing Todd Gleason: Matt Bennett is out of the office for the afternoon. Dave Chatterton is here. He’s with Strategic Farm Marketing right here in Champaign County. Thanks for joining me on short notice. I want to know about the corn market. You can talk about yesterday, the up move that came along with the USDA report and the below-trend line yield that they released, and then, of course, how things proceeded today. Dave Chatterton: Yes, Todd, pretty interesting action. I think the bulls in the market are a little bit disappointed here that we didn’t have that follow-through today to the momentum that we gained yesterday. At the end of the day, in our view, Todd, when we see a market go up 20 cents one day, go down 10 the next day, we’re still up net 10. We’ll call that a victory, especially considering the history of that August report from USDA and how volatile it can be. Having said that, the corn action today definitely caught a few people off guard yesterday with that yield estimate coming in well below the trade expectations. There are a lot of other people in the analyst marketplace that have been talking about lower corn yields, but didn’t necessarily expect the USDA to make that big of a move in the August report. We had the acreage increase to temper that just a little bit, but the fact that they increased demand gave us a new crop balance sheet that’s printing a 1.6 type of a handle for new crop carryout. That’s just above that 10% mark that we consider the make-or-break in terms of what can turn into a very bullish situation very quickly with a few other problems. When we see that stocks-to-use historically drop below 10%, it’s a warning sign. Today, the market focused a little bit on what happened with the Ukrainian ideas and this potential offer from Ukraine to Russia. However, a bigger thing is we’re still watching the long tail of what was a record crop in Argentina last year and continue to see their FOB offers on corn be competitive with U.S. offers through late summer and into early fall. Today’s export sales are a great example of that, Todd. Combined export sales for new and old U.S. corn this week were 53 million bushels. That’s a historically solid number, but it compares to a 77 million bushel total the same week a year ago. That acts as a drag here on the long tail of that Argentine crop. Todd Gleason: I suppose you have been thinking and talking with folks about the agronomics of overnight temperatures. This is a crop that is not a trend line crop at this point, but it has gone through most of what you would expect to be the roughest part of the weather, because August doesn’t look terribly bad. How much grain fill can we get out of it? Do you suppose we have a big crop, because it is the second-largest corn crop on record getting bigger, or do we have a crop moving down in size and continuing to get smaller? Dave Chatterton: We’re down to typically the last 10 to 15% of grain fill, which can be very important here. Weather during August has definitely been much more favorable. We have had some of these nighttime temperatures here, five or six nights in a row in Champaign County, of temperatures that didn’t get below 70 overnight. That’s not a train wreck, but it’s not ideal either in terms of that last amount of grain fill. We continue to go into the fields, getting reports from our producers, from our agronomy team, and looking at stuff ourselves to find more pollination problems, tip back, and nitrogen loss. An accommodation of a number of problems is limiting yield. Yield ideas have certainly stabilized; they’ve stopped going down. I’m not sure that they go back up. We’re still below USDA in terms of our internal numbers. We’re using a 179 nationally, which is getting in the neighborhood of where USDA has come to. But our 203 for an Illinois number is a big difference from the USDA at 212. If I just plug Illinois in as a 202 instead of a 212, we’re taking the national yield down to about 179.5. Those conversations are still coming as the crop tour season gets started next week. Pro Farmer is going out next week, and we’ll have a number of private tours as well as the co-ops. The trade will be watching those closely. Todd Gleason: Do you think the Iowa crop will get bigger? Dave Chatterton: I don’t. The Iowa crop is good. I’m not sure in talking to our customers and from what we’ve seen that it’s necessarily a record crop as indicated by USDA. I don’t think it’s a bad crop or it gets much smaller. I just think you can take both the Iowa and Illinois numbers from USDA yesterday with a little bit of scrutiny. To their credit, before it sounds like I’m being too critical of USDA, the August report contains the first state-by-state yields of the sequence for the year. It should be seen as a marker or a starting point. It should be something that we debate going forward. Todd Gleason: Thanks much, I appreciate it. Dave Chatterton: Thank you, Todd. Todd Gleason: That is Dave Chatterton. He is with Strategic Farm Marketing right here in Champaign County, Illinois. announce: You’re listening to the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media on this Thursday afternoon. Don’t forget that today we’ll record our Commodity Week program and post it to the website at willag.org by about 6:00 this evening. Our theme music for both programs, the Closing Market Report and Commodity Week, is written, performed, produced, and courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason. Commodity Week is our weekly look at what’s happened in the world of agricultural markets. Be sure to listen online at willag.org, or you may hear the whole of the program tomorrow during this hour on our home station, and many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend. Now up next, a conversation I held this morning outside of Cisco, Illinois, at an edge-of-field practice conservation field day. We looked at two different technologies: a woodchip bioreactor and an end-of-field drainage management system. 08:08 Two Edge of Field Conservation Practices Todd Gleason: I’m University of Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason. We’re now joined by Rabin Bhattarai. He is in agricultural and bioengineering on campus, and on-site outside of Cisco and Cerro Gordo today with a bio pit, as well as some other structures to talk about drainage, nitrogen, nitrates, and control of runoff coming off of farmland. Thank you, Rabin, for taking some time with me. Tell me about the structures we have looked at so far today and how much they can help alleviate the loss of nutrients coming off a field. Rabin Bhattarai: The two practices we saw today include the denitrifying bioreactor, sometimes called a woodchip bioreactor. Rather than letting tile water, which has elevated levels of nitrate and phosphorus, end up in our drainage ditch and ultimately in the Gulf of Mexico creating a hypoxic zone, we try to reduce that nitrate level. We dig a pit and fill it with woodchips, which enhances the process of denitrification. Microorganisms eat up the nitrate in the water and convert it into nitrogen gas. That process is governed by how long the water stays in that pit, which we call retention time, and the temperature, because the process is governed by microbes which do not like cold temperatures. We have seen the system performance reduce somewhere between 30 to 90% of nitrate by load. If you have 100 pounds of nitrate coming into your bioreactor, we can reduce that down to 30 or 10 pounds. We design the system so that it can retain the water for somewhere between 12 to 24 hours. I have been monitoring these systems across the state working with Farm Bureau, monitoring eight of these systems. Some are 10 years old, some were installed last year, and performance changes over time. Initially, they are more efficient, but as the woodchips decompose, performance can go down over the years. The other practice is called drainage water management. The philosophy is don’t drain the fields when you don’t need to. In the wintertime, when you are not growing corn or soybeans, what is the point of draining the field? We put a gate at the outlet of the drainage system and try to hold that water back into the field. In the springtime, it helps drain the field faster so you can plant, and then once you plant, you can shut the gate to hold water back for the plants. This works exceptionally well in a dry year. When we have a wet spring and no rain for July and August, we can hold whatever rain we got in May and June, and the plants can use it later. Yield can go up 10, 15, even 20% when you manage the water properly. Todd Gleason: Both of these systems are designed to work with pattern tile. The end-of-field drainage management system holds water that may include nutrients, helping a crop that needs to reach deep to capture extra nutrients. The woodchip bioreactor’s function is similar but acts as a treatment system rather than holding nutrients in place. Do you like to use them in combination, and are there places where one works better? Rabin Bhattarai: Yes, we call both practices edge-of-field practices. They are placed before the water leaves the field. Where a bioreactor works versus drainage water management is a matter of placement. Flat fields with a low gradient, less than 3% or 2%, are ideal for drainage water management because we hold the water and want it to reach back as far as possible. On a flat field, holding one foot of water back on a 2% gradient might cover 50 feet of a 100-foot field. If the field is 5%, it only covers 10 feet. We have cascaded systems, stacking structures one over another to cover different parts of larger fields. A bioreactor takes a small piece of land at the edge of the field, usually out of production. We dig a trench, put in woodchips, and sometimes fill it back with dirt so you can farm on top of it. The bioreactor is a denitrifying system for water cleanup before it leaves the field. Drainage water management is a conservation system that recycles water and nutrients back to the plants. We may not see a yield benefit with a bioreactor, but in drainage water management, we have seen a reduction of 20 to 40% less flow going out of the field, and subsequently 20 to 40% fewer nutrients leaving the field. Todd Gleason: Rabin, thank you very much. Rabin Bhattarai: Thank you, Todd. Todd Gleason: That is Rabin Bhattarai. He has been talking with us from outside of Cisco, Illinois, at an edge-of-field practice conservation field day sponsored by the Illinois Farm Bureau, the Land Improvement Contractors Association, and the Lake Decatur Drainage District. 16:13 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm.net Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention to the growing regions across the planet today. We’ll stick mostly with the Corn Belt. Mike Tannura is here. He is a meteorologist and an agricultural economist trained in both, and is with T-Storm Weather where he serves as the president and CEO. You can find them online at tstorm.net. We have a lot to cover today. Thanks for being with us. Mike Tannura: Thanks for having me. This is turning into one of the more interesting growing seasons of recent years. Todd Gleason: I want to lean a little bit on your statistical training today and some of the models you have developed. Let’s begin with what the weather has been like to this point and what your expectations might be. Mike Tannura: Let’s start with rainfall. We got the corn and soybean crops planted in time. We had nice rains over most of the growing season until the second half of July. Then the rain stopped for a couple of weeks, and it turned hot across a wide area. There was some concern about dryness developing. Since late July, we’ve had great rains in a wide area up to today in August. Rainfall has not really been a problem this season. Todd Gleason: Given the rainfall amount and yesterday’s USDA numbers, which were below the trend line, does temperature have that much of an impact? Mike Tannura: It certainly can, depending on when the temperatures happen. Rains were looking great right into the middle of July, and temperatures were doing fine. Once we got into late July, we had a burst of heat. That’s part of the reason you’re seeing a little pain on the corn crop; it doesn’t like heat in July. It has stayed hot in a lot of areas. It may just be in the 80s or 90s, but it’s about warm nights. Temperatures haven’t been falling out of the 70s much recently. That’s 5 to 13 degrees above normal at night. Combine that with a daytime temperature close to normal or slightly above, and it’s warm. That is what we are starting to see, assuming the USDA numbers are onto something. Rains have been okay, but temperatures have been too warm. If you look at the GFS model ensemble run and the European ensemble run and project it into the future weighted by U.S. corn and soybean production, the data shows the next 14 days will be the warmest since 2003. The real problem is in the far southern Corn Belt into the mid-South and extending into Kansas. Three of the last four days had a high temperature measured at 109 degrees in central Kansas. While it might only affect 4 to 5% of the U.S. crops, parts of that heat will float around the southern U.S. for a while, driving these numbers high. Todd Gleason: The overnight lows above 70 really cause a problem. I guess I’m thinking about it this way: if you don’t get a good night’s sleep and you’re working, your productivity goes down. Mike Tannura: That is a great analogy. Furthermore, if the low temperature was 75 degrees and you didn’t sleep well, but the high was 76, they average out, which is generally not a problem. Currently, we have a stressful night at 75 degrees, and it’s 90 during the day. That isn’t helping; it just continues the problem. You need to look at the combination of the two. Todd Gleason: Thanks much, I appreciate it. We’ll talk with you again next week. Mike Tannura: That sounds great. Todd Gleason: That is Mike Tannura. He is with T-Storm Weather at tstorm.net online. You’ve been listening to the Closing Market Report on this Thursday afternoon. I’m University of Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason.