Commodity Marketing
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Midwest Crop Tour – Day 2
We left Fishers, Indiana early this morning and headed northwest to the Illinois border and then turned due south to Paris (I told my wife that I always wanted to go to Paris, but did not realize it would be Paris, Illinois). We had lunch in Paris and then turned west for about 50 miles […]
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Day 1 of the Crop Tour
We had our orientation meeting Sunday night in Columbus and got started on the crop tour first thing Monday morning. Our route took us on a northwesterly route through Ohio and then on a south westerly route down to Fishers, Indiana. Our first corn sample was a whopping 44 bushels, which ended up being a low […]
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Off to the Crop Tour
I will off to the Midwest Crop Tour beginning tomorrow morning very early (even for me, out of bed at 3:15 to get to my flight in time). I am meeting up with Chris Barron (who write’s the Ask the Margin Expert column for Agweb) at the Cedar Rapids airport. We drive to Champaign, IL, […]
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Expectations For Farm Income Dropping Rapidly
For those states comprising the Kansas City Fed District (Nebraska, Mountain States, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma), the expectations for farm income have dropped dramatically due to the drought. In a just released report on the second quarter agricultural credit conditions, several financial nuggets can be found. Due to timely rains, the wheat crop in Oklahoma […]
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What if RP had been around since 1977
I was browsing the FarmDoc website maintained by the University of Illinois and came across a series of slides put out as part of the 2010 Illinois Farm Economics Summit. One of the slides was a projection of Revenue Protection payments per acre from 1977 to 2011 assuming the coverage had been available. I am […]
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How Does High Grain Prices Affect “Elevator” Risks
Another slide that I found very interesting from the AG Symposium was the total estimated monies needed for grain purchase and hedging by commercials for corn, wheat and soybeans. The chart provided the actual amounts needed for the 2006-07 marketing year to the 2011-12 year and then provided an estimate of the worst case in […]
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Additional Thoughts on the KC Fed AG Symposium
Continuing our post from yesterday: During the last 10 years, the world has planted an extra 184 million acres to the 10 ten major row crops. The Black Sea area has added 48, South America 42 and China 31 million acres. The US has only added 8 million acres. Total acres in production has increased […]
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Thoughts from the KC Fed 2012 Agricultural Symposium
The Kansas City Federal Reserve held a Ag Sympoisum on July 16, 2012. The presentations are available on their website, but I thought I would recap some of the interesting things I found in reviewing the presentations. William Hudson of the ProExporter Network had a presentation entitled “What Lies Beyond the Horizon for Farm Income? […]
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Ethanol Makers are Getting Squeezed
The Wall Street Journal issued a report today on how Midwest Ethanol makers are getting squeezed by the rapid increase in corn prices (to read the article, you may need a subscription). Production earlier in the year was running at about 950 million barrels per day. The current run rate is about 800 million barrels […]
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Smithfield Foods to import corn from Brazil
Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, said Tuesday it will import corn from Brazil. This is most likely a result of Brazil soybeans being cheaper to import by ship than to transport them by rail to the East Coast. Also, in another report, it appears the Southern Brazil crush operators may run out of […]