Katie Geerdes

For corn, RJO technician Dave Toth identifies the current price strength as being still only a "bear market correction" that would mark out a C-Wave on the Elliott count, but he says the alternative is for this rally to be a "dramatic 3rd-Wave of a major reversal higher." The possibility of broader trend change needs to see July corn futures sustain a move above $4.75, which would complete a 50-percent retracement of the slide from the October high. July soybeans have to first clear their March high at $12.40 before they can reach the 50-percent retracement level at $12.81.   On the way higher, old-crop corn and soybean futures could possibly face pushback from heavier farmer selling. At $4.75, many farmers across the country are getting close to or above $4.50 cash values while a rally toward the $12.81 futures target would likely bring the average cash soybean bid near $12. It is also notable that a rally for July corn to $4.75 should be expected to poke the new-crop December contract into the $4.90's. More farmers are expected to make their first sales or hedges for the new-crop if the December contract gets close to $5, which is not…

When the Biden Administration released its new rules allowing corn ethanol to qualify for SAF credits, I noted how the biofuel industry took what to me felt like a gut-punch with barely a whimper. They said that they saw it as "opening a door" but that is fantasy. The door stayed shut. The new standard did decrease the controversial indirect land use change (ILUC) penalty in the 40B GREET model by over 20 percent which was hoped for. However, that penalty was unjustified in the first place so they really gave us nothing. We will raise about as much corn on the moon that qualifies for SAF given the agronomic restrictions emplaced on what it takes for corn to qualify. It appeared that the biofuel industry reaction was that they were more afraid of offending the Biden Administration then they were at truly characterizing the new rules as what they were…bull-crap. The rules released applied to 40B sustainable fuels tax credits for just this year and the previous year which means they were worthless as announced in arrears. They failed to release the model for the 45Z standard in 2025 which at this point is the pertinent info needed. There…

Disappointing April Planting Progress Now Stalled   With the very early teasing of spring starting in February this year, I was anticipating the possibility of planting everything in April. I was planning to plant soybeans first. Then the weather happened. My corn went in April 25th but the soybeans will be planted in May. The family got nearly 50% of its corn in, in the short window that opened last month. The open conditions so early this year, allowed prep work which made it possible for a lot of crops to get planted in a very short open window. We had an extraordinary number of prep days this year but too few days that were actually fit to plant. Climate Scientist Eric Snodgrass was looking for things to break open in mid-April but the real spring was reluctant to arrive and is still coming in the forecast. The cool/wet pattern prevails. Looks like most crops will get planted in May. It is still snowing in the west and the frost line dips into the NE Corn Belt failing to fully retreat into Canada as well. The good news is that the area still under drought continues to shrink in the…

As a baby-boomer I am old enough to harbor some animosity toward the Japanese, not only for the Day of Infamy December 7th, 1941 that they inflicted on us but for the way they conducted the war. Japanese soldiers fought to the death which meant a lot more American soldiers had to die to kill them. There is justified ill-will in the region harbored by the Chinese and the Koreans for brutal treatment from the Japanese army. The survival rate of allied prisoners of war held by the Japanese was very low due their inhumanity. By contrast if US POWs reached German Stalags there was a high probability, they lived to talk about it after the war. The war ended and Douglas MacArthur did not repeat the mistake of Versailles ending WW1. He let the Japs up easily, allowing them to keep their Emperor, who was legitimately a war criminal, recover their dignity and due to good behavior, their independence. The Japanese people took it from there, rebuilding their nation and joining the community of nations to become a respected ally from the last cold war into this new one. They are a stable liberal Western democracy and one of…

My recent article on Tesla/EVs generated such a response from you that I thought it deserved another swing. Geniuses have done amazing things. Aristotle, Issacc Newton, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Archimedes, Michealangelo, Mozart, Beethoven, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Steven Hawking, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are just a few with the most notoriety that make the list of Geniuses that have advanced the development of the human race with their intellect.  Yes, even Nikola Tesla, the namesake of Elon Musk's attempt to reinvent vehicles with electric propulsion, was a genius which is why Musk picked his, as the name of his company. Musk is considered to be a genius himself but there is IQ and there is EQ. Musk has a lot of the former and maybe hindered by not enough of the later. On the surface his personal life doesn't look like one run like a genius but then again if you look back at all the historical geniuses, they were all a bit eccentric. I think that he let his emotions rule the decision to buy Twitter which has to have been one of the most immediate flushes of cash down the drain that must have his investors wondering…

This week's planting progress numbers did not trigger any alarms for the market, as corn plantings were just ahead of their 5-year average at 12 percent while soybeans at 8 percent were double their normal pace.  Even the recently water-logged Delta states had caught up on row crop and cotton plantings. Patchy spring storms have still made for somewhat of a sporadic start to the new planting season, but the moisture has been welcomed after a dry winter for most. As always, the risk will be that rain continues to fall where plantings eventually become delayed while the driest areas of the country could keep missing out.   Many of the areas where we are getting reports of active planting are the same areas that suffer the most from lingering drought. The large patch of long-term drought spreading from Kansas through eastern Nebraska, northern Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin encompasses a portion of the country that is relatively much further along on planting corn and soybeans.  Across most of the Eastern Corn Belt and down throughout the Southeast, drought is not as much of a concern as is the wetter forecast for the start of the planting season. A drier…

Tesla's Cybertruck sales lost the gas pedal. Almost literally… as sales were put on hold.  Its creator, Elon Musk, may suffer from the greatest case of hubris ever contracted by a genius. The line between genius and madman cycles close and he has been alleged to have crossed it by taking on so many tasks that he can no longer do any of them well. Musk loves the moonshots but his attention seems to drift away to chase after the next bright shiny object that grabs his interest when the unfinished work gets hard on the current one. Tesla has gone from being unable to manufacture enough EV vehicles to satisfy the initial demand of those infatuated with them, to when once filled, additional demand turned out to be less than they expected it would be from the less infatuated. Color me fully un-infatuated. I see Tesla's new truck as the ugliest tin can ever put on 4 wheels. I kept wondering when someone was going to clue Tesla designers in on the fact that they were building an EV ugly duckling but they did not want to hear it. They actually expected to mass produce a near $100,000 model…

My family wrapped up the 23/24 soybean harvest on our farm in Brazil.  Yields came in at about 59 bpa, which is around 10% below APH.    Yields started out promising at the start of harvest but the later planted fields were disappointing.  Considering the ultra-dry start to the season, we came out ok.  When I was at the farm in mid-December, things looked rather bleak.  By the third week of December the rainfall started to pick up again and the crops got caught back up.  We are more of a seed farm than a grain farm and so the quality of the seed means as much or more to us than the quantity of grain produced.  It rained a lot in March as harvest was progressing, which tends to damage germination levels.   Safrinha corn stages are quickly approaching 80% in the pollination to grain fill stage.  Earlier planted corn is "saved" at this point as they are at the ending stage of the crop cycle.  Meanwhile later planted corn is left extremely exposed to the start of the dry season.  The ten-day European forecast shows a giant donut hole forming over Central Brazil, encompassing major second crop corn production…

There is not a neighboring European or country in Asia which has had any interaction with Russia and Russians in their long histories which has not come to regret ever trusting their motives, intentions or words. Russians are about as close today to being the ruthless Vikings of old as exists. They will lie, cheat, steal, kill without aversion to getting whatever their want of the moment turns out to be. What they want is whatever others have that is convenient for them to take. Fins, Poles, Latvians, Georgians, or Ukrainians harbor no illusions over who and what Russians are. They are carrying forth a legacy of empire in which they see themselves as the high caste and the rest of the world their vassals. There is no such thing as an agreement, treaty, armistice or détente that is anything more than a chess move to allow Russia to seek out the next weakness in opponents to exploit. To Russians everyone is an opponent, every breath is taken toward conquest. The collapse of the Soviet Union represented the limits of extension of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe. The Russian Federation under Putin is an attempt at a secondary rally in…

Typically, most watch the US drought monitor but NOAA releases a North American version every two weeks. One can see that while drought has been completely mitigated in the Western US there are still lingering patches of drought in the Heartland. The drought has not been mitigated in Canada while the severe concentrated drought still covers Mexico with no sign of relenting. Where we live in Northwest IA the drought here is gone. Our soil moisture reserves have been fully recharged by late fall, winter and now spring rains so that we are starting the season out with a full tank of subsoil moisture. We got nearly 2 inches of rain last week and for the first time we had excess water standing in fields. More rain is forecast this week so planting will not be as super-early as thought. Additional rain now could actually delay planting and be a negative thing. There are other regions such as in the ECB or Delta where too much rain is a problem. Then there is still Kansas that can be counted upon for drought.   The primary characteristic of the climate setup for 2024 is the transition from El Nino to La…