September 3, 2010

Wheat futures were called to be 8 to 10 cents higher. Corn futures were called to be 1 cents higher. Soybean futures were called to be 7 to 9 cents higher. Dow Jones was up 111 points at 10420, live cattle were unchanged at 98.45, feeder cattle were down 57 cents at 114.17, crude oil was down 40 cents at 76.53, and gold was down 2.30 at 1249.20.

Here's how the grain markets fared out for the week. Wheat for the week was up 57 cents, milo was up 33 cents, corn was up 28 cents and beans were up 9 cents.

First of all this week's export sales came in at 1,024,100 tonnes and that was above the highest trade estimate. Sales need to average 466,000 tonnes each week to reach USDA's forecast for the marketing year. The biggest buyers were Nigeria, Turkey, Mexico and Egypt.  Japan did buy 138,857 tonnes of what on its regular weekly tender. Tunsia bought 50,000 of optional origin wheat on a scheduled order. An announcement by Vladmir Putin this morning indicated that Russia will extend its ban on grain exports unrtil after next year's summer/fall harvest is complete. For corn the export sales came in a whopping 1,658,200 tonnes and that was also above trade estimates. Sales need to average 782,000 tonnes each week to reach USDA's forecast. South Korea's  Major Feedmill Group is looking to buy 110,000 tonnes of corn for delivery in January. The USDA also announced various importers this week that were not included in the latest weekly data. And they have also announced a sale of 120,000 tonnes of corn to Egypt yesterday  morning.  For soybeans the weekly export sales report came in at  613,900 tonnes where sales need to average 448,000 tonnes each week to reach the USDA forecast. Yesterday we saw a choppy trade for soybeans. The market moved higher overnight. The USDA did announce a sale of 100,000 tonnes of soybeans to Egypt for deliver during the 2010/2011 crop marketing year. This is the second such sale in recent weeksand it points to the recent overall improvement in the US competitive position in the big import markets of the Middle East.

Today is Friday and it is the beginning of what we call Labor Day Weekend. For most of us our kids who are in college will be coming home for the long weekend maybe not so much to see mom or dad but to get home where they can eat and sleep for nothing and not have to worry about where their meal was going to come from at least for the next few days. Back when I was in college I would come home for Labor Day weekend mainly because dad kind of requested that I did so that I and my two other brothers could do our annual chore of cleaning wheat for seed. Now we had a Clipper Cleaner and it was a real machine. We would have it placed in the grainery just  next to the bin that had the wheat that we were going to clean. When cleaning wheat one of us would be in the bin scooping the wheat into the Cleaner and one would be using a scoop shovel pulling out the cleaned wheat at the bottom of the Cleaner and the third of us would alternate. Now this was something that we kind of enjoyed but at the same time we would have liked to have been doing something more fun. We would start cleaning wheat in the morning and it would take nearly all day to clean the wheat that we needed to clean. After we had been doing this for some time we had watched dad to see how he would adjust the Cleaner to make it go faster or slower. We would finally get smart after a while and would try to adjust it to go faster but that speed didn't last long as dad would periodically check on us and would notice how the Cleaner was going a little too fast and not clean the wheat like he wanted it to. So after a while we just left it alone and maintained the pace that kept us cleaning nearly all day. That was how we would spend our Labor Day weekend.