Friday February 28, 2020

• Snobelen’s Lucknow office is closed today due to weather and road conditions. You can call Brendan at 1519-389-7591 if you need assistance or grain marketing. 
• France’s AgriMerc has pegged France’s Soft  wheat crop at 64% in Good/Excellent, down 1 point from last week but down from 85% a year ago
• The International grains council is forecasting a record world wheat crop in 2020/2021 at 769 MMT  thanks to a 2% increase in planted area. They also increased their 2019/2020 crop by 2 MMT to 763 MMT 
• AAFC wheat forecast includes a 14% increase in wheat stocks or 700’000 MT increase to 5.7 million tonnes ending stocks of wheat, which is the largest in 6 years.  
• Soybean export sales for the US were ugly this week at just 12.5 million bushels down from a mediocre estimates of 22-33 million bushels. this compares to 75 million bushels from a year ago. 
• Crude prices have breached the $45 per barrel mark, the first time since late 2018.
• With the crude oil prices dropping watch our Canadian dollar as well. As we write this it sits at $0.743 which down from yesterday and Wednesday.
• If you were watching our online prices for Old Crop corn/beans/wheat. you will have noticed we have rolled from the March 2020 futures and are now on the May 2020 futures for all 3 commodities. 
• Soybean futures yesterday had closed higher partly from spill over strength from soybean meal after major competitor Argentina may soon be faced with higher export taxes , which in theory could boost US sales later on.