May 23 | Closing Market Report
The commodity markets are now closed until Monday evening in observance of the Memorial Day weekend. From the Lende Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market report for the May 2025. I'm Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Mike Zuzlow. He's at GlobalComResearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas.
Todd Gleason:Eric Snodgrass will join us to discuss the weather forecast for the growing regions across the planet during the closing market report as well as on our commodity week program, which you'll hear if you can stay with us on our home station this afternoon in its entirety, partially if not, and it's already up online at willag.org. And many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend too. Eric was joined by Dave Chatterton and Joe Jansen for our commodity week program. And one last reminder, this afternoon from three to six o'clock at Riggs Beer, that's in Urbana, there will be a field day, a field fest for small grains. You're invited to come out, and there will be food trucks with specialty menus featuring small grains.
Todd Gleason:That's today, three to six at Riggs Beard. We hope to see you there.
announce:Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
Todd Gleason:July corn for the day on the close at 04:59 and a half, three and a half lower. December at 04:50 and three quarters. A settlement price there down 2 and a half cents. July soybeans at $10.60 and a quarter settled 7 at a quarter lower, and the November settlement at $10.50 and a half down four and three quarters. Bean meal, $2.96 $22.30 lower.
Todd Gleason:The bean oil, 24¢ higher at $49.35, and wheat futures for the soft red, 2¢ lower. Settlement price at $5.42 and a half in the July contract. July winter wheat futures in the hard red at $5.38 and 3 quarters down a penny and a quarter. Live cattle futures, a nickel lower. They settled at $2.10, $210.45.
Todd Gleason:Feeders at $300.37 and a half cents, up 60¢, and lean hogs at a hundred and $1.55. 4 hundred pounds down 55¢. Diesel fuel for the day at $2.07 and 6 tenths, just about unchanged for the day. The crude oil at $61.44 up 24¢, and the wholesale price of gasoline down a penny and seven tenths at $2.07 and 4 tenths of a cent per gallon. The S and P five hundred around 28 points lower, the Dow Jones Industrial Average off about a 70 points at this hour.
Todd Gleason:We're now joined by Mike Zuzlow. He's at GlobalComResearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas to take a look at the marketplace. Hello. Thank you for being with us on this last trading day before the Memorial Day weekend. Always things can change during that.
Todd Gleason:It looks like the trade was stepping away just in anticipation of wanting to be evened up before the weekend. Is that what you think happened today?
Mike Zuzolol:Yeah. I think so, Todd. You know, we had a weather bull market, the earlier part of the week and and really kinda peaked on Wednesday and and tried to go a little bit harder on Thursday, but we kind of ran out of gas for a couple of different reasons. And the bull was kind of penned in as we headed into Friday. And one of the big reasons was we just got a great Western Corn Belt rain, Northern Plains rain, Dakotas.
Mike Zuzolol:We really did do a lot in alleviating a potential 2012 drought scenario brewing and the market probably having to pay attention to that scenario brewing this week as we are hitting that Memorial Day holiday weekend. But then Friday morning, we got really thrown a pretty big curveball with fresh news about new tariffs to the EU. And I'd say between that and the other second big thing that came into the marketplace before Friday morning was just the pure uncertainty by the trade when it came to the bean oil and the biodiesel fuel. We were trading two percentage point ranges pretty much all week long in bean oil, especially in the middle part of the week, one day up 2%, the next day down 2% on rumors, on news, on biofuel policy talk, on the new House bill that got passed. And so when I walked away Friday afternoon and got ready to talk to you, I really hadn't gotten much in terms of a conclusion or a mindset heading into the weekend holiday.
Mike Zuzolol:And the only thing I would say is that we finally found the wheat weather bowl, and it is still a global weather bowl. We still have a hot spot in The U. S. It's not as big as it was. We still have a Black Sea hot spot.
Mike Zuzolol:It's not as big as it was. And we still have a Chinese hotspot in their wheat plains that's almost as big as it has been. So I think when we come back, the first thing I'll look at after the holiday is to see if the wheat does resume that stronger weather driven uptrend again, especially given the new monthly low in the dollar on Friday and especially given the weekly export sales performed really well again.
Todd Gleason:On that note, the markets are closed until Monday evening, and they're actually closed all the way through Monday evening. There's nothing happening over the weekend at the CME Group. That's time enough for the weather to change. You'll pay attention to that. You did mention this morning's trade and tariff functions with the European Union.
Todd Gleason:How did the reaction take place at the CME Group? Did the markets jump lower? Can you see that in the trade during the day?
Mike Zuzolol:Yeah. I don't think we gapped lower, but we did. I think we definitely felt the ripple effect of the stock market. And I think the ethanol market and again, the biofuel market in general, very nervous, after that announcement. Having said that, though, Todd, I was surprised that the optimistic tone that the Secretary of Treasury took both with a Bloomberg interview, which I did not watch, but I did watch a Fox interview right before the market opened on Friday morning for the day trade.
Mike Zuzolol:And he's talking very sincerely about a good faith attitude coming out of Asia and also talking about India's trade agreement potentially coming very short term, and it's going very well. So I think that's the bigger story for me is, again, going back to those weekly export sales, they're not backing down at all, and especially in the new crop wheat. And I think that's really good, and this weaker dollar seems to be panning out. And so I really hope that we can continue with the idea that supplies are tightening because I think that this past week and last week, we've seen the global end user and the global demand come off of the sidelines and start to pick up some bushels here and buy a little bit ahead. And we are still, after all, by about $20 a ton, still cheaper than South America when it comes to our golf price of corn New Orleans.
Todd Gleason:It did seem that the thought process for this week related to China and trade, Asia and trade both, but particularly China was last week, I'm not sure that the trade really believed much what was coming out of Switzerland, but or Geneva. But this week, things seem to be in a much better position. We've got a long weekend. I suppose it could change again. What are you telling farmers this week about your plans still for their seasonal marketing, if you have them, in place?
Mike Zuzolol:Yeah. I'm I'm still very much in line with where I've been the past two or three weeks, Todd, of really wanting to push hard on soybean hedges and push hard on cattle hedges. That makes Friday's cattle on feed report very important. And as we talked about, it makes it very important to find out whether there is damage in Argentina from the flooding that we saw right after the previous week ended over last weekend and to see, especially if the meal market can really start to pick it up and see a short covering rally because, a, the funds are so net short and b, they are the number one meal exporter in the world. So if we've got issues down there in Argentina from these floods, it should start to be showing up relatively soon.
Mike Zuzolol:Other than that, I feel pretty comfortable that this rally in May gives me the opportunity to get some good profitable hedges in place in the beans. And obviously, with the cattle still near record highs, that's a profitable place to be too.
Todd Gleason:Thank you. Mike Zuzlow is with GlobalComResearch.com. He is in Atchison, Kansas. We talk to him each and every Thursday. Remember, the markets are closed until Monday evening now in observance of the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
Todd Gleason:If you'd like to start that off right, you can join us at Riggs Beer in Urbana this afternoon for a small grains field day. It starts at 03:00. Eric Snodgrass is now here. He's with NutriNag Solutions and Daggerable. Hi, Eric.
Todd Gleason:Thank you for being with us, and thank you for taking the time to join our commodity week discussion yesterday. I appreciate that too.
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. You bet. I certainly enjoyed talking with with those guys and trying to put a narrative on what we've seen this spring.
Todd Gleason:Yeah. You, along with Joe Jansen from the University of Illinois, and Dave Chatterton, for those who can stay with us for the whole of the hour today, they'll hear all of that discussion. For those who cannot, it's up online right now at willag.0rg. And many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend because, the three of us asked you questions yesterday quite pointedly about the weather forecast across the planet for many of the growing regions. Mhmm.
Todd Gleason:I kinda like to stay away from that at the moment. What is it that you've been thinking more broadly about this week as it relates to the weather? I know you're always considering, the climate, the weather, and how things have changed, maybe even more recent events.
Eric Snodgrass:Well, yeah, that that conversation with you and Dave and Joe, we hit on one of the big topics, which is precipitation disparity. That's a phrase I keep using. And it's to explain again, like, gosh, I mean, Missouri over the next seven or eight days could pick up five to six marches of rain while Northern Illinois doesn't see another drop. That stick around, listen to that. It's a good discussion.
Eric Snodgrass:I go all the way through summer. That's been the second most prevalent question asked to me this spring. The top one has been wind. And so this morning I got up at about, I don't know, 04:45 and I just started to dig into this. And I want to tell you what I found out, Todd.
Eric Snodgrass:So I was curious, first of all, has this spring been wet and where does it rank in terms of climatology? So I pulled up some data and sure enough, yes, in terms of wind gusts right here out to our west, everywhere, the whole Midwest has had one of its windiest springs in history, but certainly since 1980, it's been extremely windy. So we start digging into that, asking questions saying what the heck is going on? And it's really from two components, right? We've had big synoptic scale wind.
Eric Snodgrass:That's the wind around the big low pressure systems. And then we've had the winds from our thunderstorms, which have been just incredible. I mean, last week after you and I got off the phone, we watched the development of a huge storm complex to our south and went right to our West and it blew up a dust storm that started in Central Illinois, went all the way to Chicago. All right, all that set aside, this morning I found something interesting and I want to share it with you. Okay.
Eric Snodgrass:I went looking specifically at the source of our wind systems, which is our global temperature patterns. And I found an interesting thing that was different from the time period of the 80s and 90s versus the 2000s. And that difference is in the North Pacific. There have been since the beginning of the 2000s much more prevalent large ridges in the North Pacific versus the 80s which was just cold weather there and deep troughs. And it has completely changed the signal of the wind pattern across North America.
Eric Snodgrass:And it's been part of this increased spring wind issue. So you say, are we going to see a really windy spring next spring? Well, I don't know if it'll be as windy as this one, but if we stay in the longer term trend, we are in a windier regime now than we have been in our historic past. And that has made things very difficult on our spring field work. It's another kind of part of the complex storytelling around why our spring windows have tightened up so much.
Eric Snodgrass:The only thing that's allowed us to survive the way that the atmosphere has really tightened up our spring opportunities to do operational field work has been our equipment's bigger, better and faster. If we were using eighties technology right now, we would be talking about spring weather that's going to delay us to getting stuff done all the way through probably the front half June in some cases. So Todd, that's it. That's what I've been thinking hard about. What do you think?
Todd Gleason:Well, I have a couple of questions about that because this last week's storm with the dust was a south to north event.
Eric Snodgrass:Right.
Todd Gleason:For the wind. However, we have been experiencing over the last several years, and people will understand this term, I believe, atmospheric rivers. Sure. And those usually are coming straight out of the West and blowing to the East but they're certainly very straight line kinds of storms. Mhmm.
Todd Gleason:What's the difference between the two? What cause and are are they the same is the the the what you've talked about in the North Atlantic, the ridge there, the same driving force for both?
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. It's North Pacific, just to make a quick correction.
Todd Gleason:Oh, North Pacific. Sorry. Yes.
Eric Snodgrass:Yeah. I always look upstream. Now does the Atlantic matter? Yes, it matters. But our upstream flow is coming from the Pacific.
Eric Snodgrass:So that's where we focus here. So here, here's the answer. Go back to the March. When we all went to commodity classic,
Todd Gleason:I don't
Eric Snodgrass:know if you were there or not Todd, I was out there. That was the beginning of this constant stream of strong westerly wind flow, which you just called an atmospheric river. It packed up the Western Mountains with snow. It delivered these huge wind systems that were west to east. Do you remember what we were talking about back then?
Eric Snodgrass:It was all about, oh, the drought in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, the huge dust storms that were down there that were even blowing dust all the way to us, but it was out of the Southwest or the West. That stopped early April. The jet stream went way far to the North. And instead of getting these big wind systems that kept driving systems out of the West, we built into this setup where there was a whole bunch of slow moving cutoff lows. Now here's the difference.
Eric Snodgrass:Back in early March, a storm system could start in Colorado and be in Maine in thirty six hours. We've for the last almost fifty days have seen storm systems that start off somewhere in the West and take five days to cross the country. Do you remember last week when we were getting weather out of the East? Remember the storms coming out of the East? That was because we're going around the backside of these deep cutoff lows and they've been slow, which means the pattern's gotten longer.
Eric Snodgrass:We've had these more longer duration events. And Todd, this is what we talk about next with Dave and Joe. It's do we see something in terms of this weird stagnant pattern that keeps giving us these high precipitation disparity events like flooding in Missouri or flooding in Oklahoma while Nebraska's drier, Northern Illinois is dry. Do we see that going into summer? And I think we do.
Eric Snodgrass:So there's an odd bit of behavior about this year that just has me on edge. And I hate to say this, Todd, but I've lost a couple of nights of sleep up thinking about it. And last night was one of them. I just sat there thinking about this dumb wind and what it means and can I make a narrative out of it that makes sense? So that's it.
Eric Snodgrass:That's what we're thinking through.
Todd Gleason:Well, I have one last question for you Yeah. Related to this. If you flip it upside down or you go to the Southern Hemisphere
Eric Snodgrass:Right.
Todd Gleason:Is there a similar but opposite direction, I suppose, impact?
Eric Snodgrass:Ah, good question. But the Southern Hemisphere in the mid latitudes also has a westerly wind belt. Now the low pressure systems and high pressure systems spin in different directions than here, but they also have a westerly wind belt down there. And what's interesting is right now, just like we went through a big cold snap, we're almost out of it now. Argentina is about to go into one over the next several days.
Eric Snodgrass:In fact, they're gonna get a big frost event. I think it's gonna come through quite chilly. What's also interesting about what's driving the Brazilian monsoon. Let's just think about that for one second. You've heard me tell you that the Brazilian monsoon is becoming more compacted.
Eric Snodgrass:Starting later in October and finishing earlier, either in early May or late April compared to historical past. It's all related. We're seeing that same change in subtropical high pressure systems in the Southern Hemisphere that we're seeing in the Northern Hemisphere. So it is a fascinating thing to study. But what it means is this, Todd, I can't come into this year and tell you, Oh, no, no, no.
Eric Snodgrass:This looks just like insert year here because this is a new climatological regime. We have to try to understand because people are gonna ask, is it gonna happen again next year and the year after that? And that's my job to try to answer.
Todd Gleason:And then finally, because both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere have westerlies, is that to do with the rotation of the earth?
Eric Snodgrass:Yes. Despite what you may hear on Facebook or some from some of our biggest, like, professional athletes, earth is round, and it does rotate. That that that's why sorry. That's why the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. It's not flat.
Todd Gleason:The wind blows out in
Todd Gleason:the West.
Eric Snodgrass:That's right. The earth is not flat either. And it's because it's not flat that we have weather. To be honest, we used to make our grad students do an exercise where they would try to discover what earth's weather and climate would look like if the planet was in fact flat. And what's funny is they can't do it because none of our fluid dynamics equations work in that particular situation on a planetary scale.
Eric Snodgrass:So anyway, Todd, that's that's my long and short answer to your great questions today.
Todd Gleason:Alright. Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it.
Eric Snodgrass:You bet.
Todd Gleason:Eric Snodgrass is with Nutrien Ag Solutions, and Dagger will stick around if you can for the rest of the hour. You'll hear him again in our commodity week program. If not, it's already up online at willag.0rg, and many of these stations will carry it over the weekend. You've been listening to the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. Commodity Week is next.
Eric Snodgrass:Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
Todd Gleason:Welcome to Commodity Week. I am Todd Gleason. Today we're coming to you from the Nutrien Ag Solutions Innovation Center just to the south of Champaign, Illinois. Our thanks go to one of our panelists, Eric Snodgrass with Nutrien Ag Solutions. We'll talk with him in just a minute along with Joe Jansen at the University of Illinois Agricultural Economist and Dave Chatterton at Strategic Farm Marketing also from Champaign Illinois.
Todd Gleason:Let's get an idea roughly from Joe and Dave what might be on their list of items they'd like to discuss for the day. We'll start with you, Dave.
Dave Chatterton:Yeah, Todd. I think a little bit of an inflection point for the markets here. We've had a little bit of a rally. We've gotten past that that May WASDE report. We had the punishment in terms of price come off a little bit, but still not to a level I think that's enticing a lot of farmer movement or a lot of excitement in the marketplace.
Dave Chatterton:If you look at beans in particular, probably still under the cost of production, particularly for new crop. And in a in a pretty tough situation when it when it comes to new crop, we have a time horizon in front of us in the marketplace where the seasonals turn positive, particularly for corn, but the clock is definitely ticking. If we're not gonna get that rally by the June, let's say, we're certainly starting to turn the the odds against us in terms of a price rally. So what happens here, I think, in the next three to four weeks in terms of the weather outlook, the trade deals are certainly part of that. The biofuel guidance and the and current political process that's going on in The US, all in the mix here in terms of price.
Dave Chatterton:But I think it's a time to really be paying attention and tweaking your numbers here a little bit and trying to get to a point where I hate to say it, but this may be a year where it's trying to do the best I can on beans, break even, maybe lose a little, hopefully make a little, and then, you know, the the attention to be on corn where the margins are gonna be.
Todd Gleason:And then Joe Jensen, from the University of Illinois, the things that you would like to discuss over the next twenty minutes or so.
Todd Gleason:Yeah. I think we're all thinking about to what extent is the market building some kind of weather premium in or into price or not. So that's obviously gonna be a big story, and that's the seasonal story that happens at this time of year, May, June, July. The other part, sort of what's and then the policy uncertainty around both biofuels and international trade. I think those are the two things that sort of maybe we get some resolution on those things in the next few weeks, but probably those are ongoing issues that sort of persist throughout the rest of the this marketing year.
Todd Gleason:And we'll ask Eric Snodgrass some questions as well. That's why I left you for last, Eric. But to begin with, not a question about the weather for you, but about this Innovation Center and why Nutrien decided to site it here in Champaign County. Well, think there's
Eric Snodgrass:a lot of reasons. One, we're trying to just be at the epicenter of ag in the middle part of the country, and Champaign accomplishes that. The second thing is we wanted to have a farm at scale to do our trials and to do all of our testing on. We didn't want something small. We wanted it to be like what a lot of folks deal with.
Eric Snodgrass:And so, you know, Champaign County has good ground, but we're on some of the, I guess, more marginal stuff for the county, and that's good. It allows us to kind of test what a lot of our growers are going be seeing. So it's big, it's two eighty acres. We have interesting waterways, we have power lines that run through it, and so therefore it kind of gives us a real world glimpse into kind of what we what we sell.
Todd Gleason:And you have access to the University of Illinois and some really good potential employees.
Eric Snodgrass:That's right. So the talent pipeline was huge. The biggest thing that they thought about when positioning this was that University of Illinois talent pipeline. If you go back into the main office in there, there are several of us with degrees from Illinois, so we're pretty proud to be here.
Todd Gleason:Eric Snodgrass is with NutriNAG Solutions and Agribal. He, along with Dave Chatterton, strategic farm marketing, and Joe Jensen, a member of the FarmDoc team from the College of Agricultural Consumer and Environmental Sciences, an ag economist, joined us for our commodity week program recorded yesterday afternoon. You can hear the whole of that program this afternoon up on our website at wilag.org right now at willag.0rg. And many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend. You've been listening to the closing market report from Illinois Public Media on this Friday afternoon.
Todd Gleason:You have a great weekend and a good Memorial Day. The markets are closed until Monday evening. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason.
