Old Books and Bugs

That rite of the post-winter season - spring break - has come and gone. Again! This year we visited Arizona. We didn't attend a spring training baseball game but did do some other things.

We toured a copper mine at Bisbee. We stayed overnight at the Shady Dell. Our accommodation was a restored 1950s vintage travel trailer, complete with '50s music on the radio. We walked a bit in the Saguaro National Park, west of Tucson. We stopped at Patagonia Lake State Park, an area frequented by Geronimo some years back. <Read More>

Weekly Outlook - March USDA Reports and Beyond

Corn and soybean prices continue to be influenced by a wide range of fundamental factors. Currently, those factors include prospects for the rate of economic growth and commodity demand in China, prospects for the size of the current South American crop, and prospects for the 2012 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere.

The USDA’s March 30 Grain Stocks and Prospective Plantings reports will also provide important fundamental information for both markets. Anticipating the level of March 1 stocks has become increasingly difficult over the past year or more. For corn, the difficulty lies in the erratic levels of implied quarterly feed and residual use since the spring of 2010. Stocks reports since then have provided a number of surprises. In the newsletter of March 5 some estimates of corn consumption during the December-February quarter this year and implications for March 1 stocks were outlined. A case can be made for stock levels in a wide range, but inventories within a few million bushels of 6.35 billion bushels would be consistent with the USDA’s projection of feed and residual use for the year.  <Read More>