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Good Morning farm country. Davis Michaelsen here with your morning update for Friday, March 26. From Pro Farmer’s First Thing Today, these are some of the stories we are watching this morning:
Corn futures are trading midrange and fractionally to a penny lower after two-sided trade overnight. Soybean trade was also choppy overnight, with futures currently trading midrange and 1 to 2 cents lower. Winter and spring wheat futures are also fractionally to 2 cents lower. The U.S. dollar index is posting moderate gains after jumping to a four-month high yesterday. Crude oil futures are also higher but well within Thursday’s trading range. Investors are upbeat after an encouraging U.S. weekly jobless claims update and stronger than expected showing for German business sentiment.
Shipping experts are warning that a resumption of traffic through the Suez Canal could still be days, if not weeks, away, the Wall Street Journal reports, and big shipping lines including A.P. Moller-Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd are considering diverting some vessels.
In its first full forecast for 2021-22, the International Grains Council (IGC) called for record-setting grain production, but it also expects the bigger supplies to be matched by higher consumption.
China’s Commerce Ministry in a final ruling decided not to collect anti-subsidy tariffs against Australian wine, but it will impose anti-dumping measures on some imports of wine from Australia. China has targeted a number of Australian commodities like barley, meat, dairy, cotton and timber as political tensions rose, again reminding that Chinese President Xi Jinping will work to impose real costs for governments/businesses that criticize his country.
The Chinese branch of the Better Cotton Initiative said Friday it did not find forced labor as it pertains to cotton production in China’s Xinjiang in the last eight years. The region is home to 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, and millions of them have been confined to internment camps, according to foreign researchers and governments.
The Farm Service Agency has gone from a maximum 25% to 50% staffing local offices and up to half of the FSA workforce can now be onsite in service centers. This follows complaints from FSA staffers and farmers about the prior 25% limitation.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said it will start publishing additional biofuels data in a monthly report to account for the increase in biofuel production.
Cash cattle trade picked up Thursday between $115 and $116 after some earlier action at similar price levels. But futures’ price response has been fairly subdued as the market has been watching for higher prices for quite a few weeks and futures already have a premium built in relative to this week’s action.
Lean hog futures posted slight to sharp gains, with spring contracts leading to the upside and hitting new contract highs. After the market closed, USDA delivered a bullish Quarterly Hogs & Pigs Report, which could spur followthrough buying today. Cash hog bids continue to climb.
