4/11/2022

Corn and soybeans both traded 5-10 higher overnight but markets became mixed through the remainder of both sessions.  Corn set fresh contract highs from the July 22 contract forward at the 8:30am open but turned lower by midday and closed well off those marks.  Soybeans were down hard on the day with weakness setting in shortly after the 7:00pm open.  The USDA announced a very large corn export sale to China at 8 a.m. this morning that included 1,020,000 tonnes total: 680,000 tonnes for delivery in the 2021/22 marketing year and 340,000 tonnes for delivery in the 2022/23 marketing year.  It's great to see a couple large sales to the single most important export customer we have but the logistics of shipping everything on the book within the marketing year will be difficult.  Like the late/additional soybean purchases by China, this is a split of old and new crop that can easily all be rolled into the new crop delivery period.  The Ukraine/Russia conflict affects corn more than soybeans but Ukraine did produce a large amount of sunflower.  With that market disrupted, strength and support spilled over to the soy oil market.  Today, Ukraine announced that they would have 10% of their sunflower oil export capacity, many assumed it would be 0.  Weekly export inspections were mid-range of estimates with 1.418 mln tonnes of corn and 766k tonnes of soybeans inspected for shipment, close to unchanged from the previous week.