4/14/2022

Corn and soybeans both firmed higher overnight into the day session and finished the week mixed.  Near the mid-day point of the session, corn did a round trip from daily highs to daily lows, trading around 8-9 cents each way in the matter of roughly one hour, only to set fresh contract highs again after noon.  The USDA announced the sale of 132,000 tonnes of soybeans for delivery to China during the 2021/22 marketing year.  The weekly export sales report showed routine business with 1.333 mln tonnes of corn and 549k tonnes of soybeans sold last week.  Current sales for old crop corn and soybeans well exceed the paces needed to meet the USDA targets but there's no room for logistical errors or delays to get it all shipped.  30"+ of snow in parts of North Dakota and Montana surely won't help railroad performance.  The USDA is already issuing 2022/23 soy crop estimates for Brazil with initial figures set at 139 million tonnes on a 4.5-million-acre expansion.  Not too far off of where the set their initial total production estimate for this year's Brazil crop on much fewer acres.  The biggest headline to end our market week is the largest shipping company in the world, Maersk, has announced it will liquidate its Russian assets and completely leave the country.  Basically, this means there is currently no maritime logistics in Russia.