Monday May 4, 2020

  • Active fieldwork over the weekends pressuring the markets lower to start the week 
  • Another week of good planting conditions expected for the U.S. this week, some rains in the next 24 hours then drier for the rest of the week 
    • Currently no fear of negative impacts from the cold snap expected at the end of the week 
  • Commodities markets also under continued pressure from rising Chinese-U.S. tensions over blame of the coronavirus 
  • SovEcon reported that Russian wheat exports for the month of April reached 3.2 MMT –  an increase of 0.1 MMT from March
  • Fridays USDA soybean crush numbers for March set a new record at 192.2 million bu – higher than expected and 3.4 million bu higher than previous record month 
  • USDA numbers for corn used for ethanol in March was 411.8 million bu – down from 432.7 million bu used in February and 442.0 used last March 
  • Expected global ethanol production could drop to levels last seen in 2013 and may take as long as 2 years to recover to 2019’s production