Todd Gleason: From the land to Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois. This is the closing market reported as the December 2025. I'm extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Mike Zuzolo. He's a globalcomresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas, and we'll hear from Eric Snodgrass of Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrabal along the way.

We'll hear another one of the elevator pitches I collected at the National Association of Farm Broadcasting Convention in Kansas City last month. Today, we'll hear from the Propane Education and Research Council on this Friday edition of closing market report from Illinois Public Media. If you can stay with us for the whole of the hour, you'll also hear our commodity week program including our panelists Greg Johnson, Dave Chatterton, and Kurt Kimmel. If not, it's up online right now at willag.org and many of these radio stations will carry it over the weekend. Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.

March corn for the day settled at $4.43 and 3 quarters, 3 quarters of a cent lower. May down three quarters at $4.51 and a half a bushel, and new crop December at $4.62 down a quarter of a cent. January beans, $10.49 and a quarter, three lower. The March down two and a half at $10.59 and a half, and November at ten sixty seven and three quarters, down three and a quarter cents. The March in the wheat soft red at five zero nine and three quarters, up two for the day, and the hard red March at five fifteen and a quarter, opinion three quarters lower.

Mike Zuzolo at globalcomresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. First and foremost, Mike, happy holidays to you. Thank you for being with us and volunteering again for 2025. I don't know how many seasons you've been with us, but a very long time, sometime in the late nineties, and we appreciate all the work that you do.

Mike Zuzolo: I just can't tell you how much it's been a joy of my life and, has been such a nice thing to do and so many nice people to meet along the way. Most of all, you, Todd, all the great people, going all the way back to Joan Harshberger and all those people that, we met in the early days and all the great commodity analysts, both past and present. And, just a very Merry Christmas to you and all the great listeners in in Will Radio Land.

Todd Gleason: Thank you very much. It is a gift, every day. I think it really is, and I do appreciate what you do. Let's start with the things that you can talk about today. What's different in the marketplace, if anything, this week than it was in the previous week or the last month?

Mike Zuzolo: Yeah. I I will start with what most of the clients and subscribers have asked me about this week, and it's been the news breaking mid late week. I think it was about 02:00, 03:00 in the morning on Thursday that Bloomberg broke a story that China had gotten to about 7,000,000 tons of their 12,000,000 ton soybean import quota number agreed upon by the trade agreement. Reuters backed that up. I believe it was on Friday morning or Thursday night, But the trade just didn't wanna trade that, and I think there was quite a bit of head scratching around that.

My take on this is is that while that is a great number and it's a meaningful number, we've seen the Brazilian southern Port Of Paranagua's price drop about $50 a ton since the November, essentially since Thanksgiving, and they're trading instead of $4.65 down around $4.15 a ton now US. The second thing and probably right along the same lines and maybe just as important is the fact that if the Southern Brazil rainfall is increasing, which it did throughout the week this week, from what I could tell and what I'm picking up from colleagues in Chicago, that would take the pressure off of the Chinese buying more. In other words, if there's more beans coming in Brazil, that means we're not gonna get any kind of elongated, chance to sell to them for past the month of February, March, maybe early April at the longest. But it really assures the trade that the supplies are going up even though we've gotten this good export demand news. So that is an issue that we're probably going to have to readdress either before we go home for the holiday or right after we come back from a holiday because we still have a question mark about Argentina.

And I think the trade has really played it well by buying corn and selling beans, even though the wheat market has been pressuring the corn market as a whole. Argentina's weather outlook does not look nearly as promising, and the trade, I think, really tapped into that along with the very strong corn demand that we saw in export and record ethanol crush this week. So at the end of this week, Todd, we were looking at quite a contrast in this market where the corn was at its highest level since June, the soybeans at its lowest level, I believe, since, October, mid October, late October.

Todd Gleason: Okay. So what does that mean going forward? Because there is battle at this point, and I don't know which of those two will lead in 2026. Do you have some estimations?

Mike Zuzolo: Yeah. I mean, without the wheat and the crude, and and we have gotten to a point where we've made new four year lows in the crude oil market this month. This week, the soft red wheat was able to get within under a dime of testing its five year low. With those kind of price actions, I don't look to the market to be able to allow the corn to go higher by itself. And so what we need along with a dry Argentine forecast is something in the wheat and something in the crude oil market to change the dynamics so that the soybeans feel as though they have some support from the surrounding commodities.

And so that's the short answer, and that's, I think, very doable, Todd, during the holiday season just because of the thinner volume and and things that are going on during the holidays typically, and and the weather has been pulled up as we've talked about in this year by a couple of weeks. But now as we get ready for the New Year holiday specifically, that's when the real weather market starts, not just in Argentina, but in Center West Brazil. And and we've talked about that as late as, last week between both me and, Eric Snodgrass on the same closing market report, which I thought was a really good one.

Todd Gleason: Yeah. So we can go back to that too, by the way. Folks who want to can find that still online in the podcast section at willag.org or just search it out in the podcast. You can scroll back to it, and find it from last Friday. I do wanna talk about wheat just a bit more.

If wheat needs to lead, what do we know about, the Northern Hemisphere as it's related to the Black Sea, France, and maybe their demand center, which would be in The Middle East and parts of North Africa, which also raises a wheat crop. What what do we know about supply in those areas?

Mike Zuzolo: Yeah. Great question because it is really gonna be about price and supply right here as we see our winter wheat market develop in terms of a weather market. I think the CPC thirty and ninety day outlooks that came out this week as well as the two percentage point increase in the winter wheat drought from the USDA coming out on Thursday. Both suggest that we can have a winter weather market in the wheat. But before we get there, we need to, number one, have a low in the crude oil market, which I think could come relatively quickly because I'm still very dubious about a Russia Ukraine peace plan, and we do have this Venezuela oil blockade now in place.

To more specific about your question is we did see an uptick uptick in Argentine wheat prices. They're $2.10 a ton. They're usually the lowball seller out there in this part of the world. And then in the Black Sea, Odessa's wheat price for Ukraine is around $2.30. That's where we're at in soft red wheat right now at The Gulf.

I found out through a couple different sources that the Port Of Odessa sounds as though their infrastructure has been hit bad enough that certain commodities like grains and energies, they're not doing much better than 20% shipping at this stage as far as potential, and they have, in some cases, quite a backlog of of grain trucks that are on the road right now waiting to be unloaded at the ports. And so I think that's probably where the most likely scenario is that we will see with the with Russia and Ukraine peace deal taking both wheat and crude lower on ideas that Russian wheat and Russian crude will get into the marketplace. I would say the reverse would be the opposite. So that's what we're wanting wanting to see, waiting to see, not wanting to not see peace in Ukraine and Russia, but wanting to see those prices change.

Todd Gleason: Alrighty. Thanks much. We will talk with you in the New Year. I appreciate all that you've done.

Mike Zuzolo: You bet, Todd. Thanks. Look forward

Todd Gleason: to

Mike Zuzolo: it.

Todd Gleason: Mhmm. That is Mike Zuzlow. He's with globalcommresearch.com out of Atchison, Kansas. It's time for another elevator pitch from the National Association of Farm Broadcasting Convention that took place in the month of November. Today, we'll hear about propane.

Mike Newland: Mike Newland, director of agriculture business development at the Propane Education Research Council. So the Propane Education Research Council is responsible for about three things. We do all the safety training and materials for our industry. We do consumer outreach like we're doing today, and we also do some grant investment. So on the farm, typical uses for propane are irrigation, grain drying, building heat, water heat.

Things that people may not think about us for would include killing weeds with propane, with fire, flame weeding. We've got projects in California using propane to create steam, to inject steam into the soil, to kill nematodes and weeds for vegetable production and soon to be strawberry production. We also are really promoting power generation. We've there's a big Department of Energy study that came out in July talking about the grid instability and what the future looks like over the next two to five years. So we're hyper focused right now on power generation from running a house all the way to running your critical needs on the farm, all the way to supplementing the electric grid, all running on propane.

So propane's abundant. We export about 65% of the available propane today here from The US overseas. Propane's as reasonable as from a fueling standpoint. It's probably the most economical fuel that you can purchase today, and it's incredibly environmentally friendly. We don't have to have containment.

We don't have to have any spill prevention type scenarios. So, we've got a very environmentally friendly fuel. It's very clean to burn and very cost effective. For those

Todd Gleason: who are wondering, there is a difference, of course between natural gas and propane. Propane is denser and it has more BTUs per cubic foot. Natural gas is delivered to at lower pressure rates than propane and natural gas is primarily methane while propane is a heavier hydrocarbon it burns much much hotter. On that note, when I turned 16 in '19 '80 my father bought a brand new GMC short bed pickup and said it's yours on the weekend. Keep it clean.

A month later, he had it converted to propane. That's pickup had about a 1,500 mile range. I could drive to Florida and back if I wanted without pulling into a gas station because of the 80 gallon propane tank in the bed and the gasoline tank combined. One of the things of note is that propane burns really hot and really clean, and that meant that when I changed the oil in that pickup every 3,000 miles, it looked nearly as clean as when it went in to the engine. I suppose I was driving a hybrid before hybrids were cool.

Let's turn our attention now to the weather forecast. Eric Snodgrass is here. He's with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Agrabah. Hi, Eric. Thanks for being with us today.

Eric Snodgrass: Yeah. Thanks for having me back on.

Todd Gleason: Okay. So spring's arrived because the winds came, and, man,

Eric Snodgrass: did they blow.

Todd Gleason: Oh, wait. No. That that's that's, well, the winds did come, but it's not spring. Tell me

Eric Snodgrass: about what we've been what we've been

Todd Gleason: going through the last couple of days.

Eric Snodgrass: You know, it's interesting you bring that up, though, Todd. Like, spring twenty twenty five was one of the windiest on record for much of the Central US, and it was it was a time period where there was just all sorts of conversation about major risk on for the summer growing season because of how windy it was in March. Right? We're just like, oh gosh. Are we getting ourselves into a problem?

And so we ask now. We've just watched over the last three to four days. I mean, just ferocious winds, Todd. Like, Mount Hood over in, in Oregon. I think it's Oregon.

Is Oregon or Washington? Oregon. I think it's in Oregon. 142 mile an hour wind at the top of the mountain. And then we saw gusts over a 100.

We've got fires in Colorado. They've I mean, good luck flying out to Denver today. It's gonna be I don't think you will. It's so bad. And then last night, those winds that just ripped through us were a part of that first system that dropped our temperatures 40 degrees in one day.

So we're we're feeling that spring like chaos, but now here it is, and we're we're just a few days away from our official, you know, astronomical start to winter as we almost approach the solstice. And by the way, Todd, good news is with the solstice, we're gonna stop losing daylight hours. We're about to make the rebound, which is I don't know. I find encouragement in that. Do do you?

Todd Gleason: I do. I this is the time of the year we lose minutes so fast of light, and we gain it back so quickly that you know it every day that it's getting longer, and it's just that first month or so is just fantastic as the as the daylight continues to lengthen out. I really do love it, and I make note of it every year. So let let me think about this. So big wins, and winter's coming.

The solstice is here. Drop like a son of a gun last night. Although, that's not gonna stay that way. We're gonna warm up.

Eric Snodgrass: No. I mean, you'll you'll see the sun a lot as it slowly starts to gain these, these these minutes here and then takes off, because the the pattern is such that we just parked a massive ridge over the middle middle part of the country. So if Santa's gonna have a problem, it's gonna be in California this year trying to get through the West. It is not gonna be in the Midwest, Todd. I told my son this morning if he went to school, he's like, hey, dad.

Like, what what's Christmas gonna be like? White Christmas? I'm like, no. Except for the fact that your white legs are gonna be in shorts. That's about the only thing that you're gonna see because it's you know, we we could climb out of the upper fifties, lower sixties as we approach the end of next week.

And so it's gonna be very mild and relatively dry. It's gonna be great for travel. So that that is a plus, at least on that side of it. But if you like good winter storms in this year, you need to go to California to witness theirs. All the action is in the West.

And we think we're gonna hang on to this mild stretch. I mean, it might be here all the way till the start of the new year. But, Todd, just like it did in November when it was so mild, when the pattern gets this kind of amplified and gets so blocked up the way it is, it's blocked up in Europe, it's blocked up in the North Pacific, It always crashes out of it. And when it does, it'll be crashing in the kinda coldest time of year, which will be at some point, I think, the beginning or middle of of January. So we're not done with winter by any stretch, but we're gonna go into Christmas with some pretty darn nice weather in terms of warm temperatures.

But if you wanted snow, I'm sorry. You're gonna have to go like Marquette to see it.

Todd Gleason: Yeah. So I I was thinking, and I believe Trent Ford said this in his weather forecast and review this morning. Mhmm. Two things. Mason County had a 60 mile an hour wind, interesting enough, and that we had been 10 to 15 mile 10 to 15 degrees below normal before we got the warmer weather.

Eric Snodgrass: Oh, yeah.

Todd Gleason: Yeah. So at which brings me to what you just told us about, amplification. So if we're really nice and warm over Christmas and, winter break for two weeks, I feel like January, if it turns cold again, could be a son of a gun.

Eric Snodgrass: It could, and I really don't care because the best thing about this warm up is all that snow we had on the ground melted slowly. That water is now in our soil. We've made a recovery on what has been an extremely dry year in Central Illinois overall. I mean, really, it just rained in, you know, June and July when we needed it. That's what really saved the crop.

But, when it does break, it will it'll break pretty hard again, and it's fine. We've got a recharge of soil moisture. Let's go ahead and freeze it in there and keep it all the way until, you know, February, March. I'd be fine with that. But you're right.

It will change, and the climate prediction center suggests that it will once we get into, January. And one of my top analogs now is, 2018. And 2018 did something similar to this as well. And then in January, it just crashed over cold once again, and I think that that's a a possibility going forward. By the way, another analog year that I've got is 2009.

So a couple of interesting ones starting to show up with the rapid collapse of, La Nina, which we're all expecting to start taking shape in the New Year.

Todd Gleason: Anything else on the long range forecast here before we turn to South America?

Eric Snodgrass: Yeah. I would just say this. There is there are indications that spring twenty twenty six could be on the drier side of average. In Illinois, we're fine with that. We love that.

That's more open, not not completely wide open windows, but more open windows to get a crop in. And as long as the rains come back mid to late June and then are there in July, we tend to have bumper crops in those years. But I just wanna let folks know that we've had some forecast from previous springs where I'm like, hey. Tight windows. Tight windows.

Tight windows. If you ask me to just talk about it now, even before the New Year starts, I I think I see chances of maybe things opening up a little bit differently into twenty twenty six's growing season. So, yeah, that's just one thing to think about.

Todd Gleason: Speaking of growing seasons, we should take out the South American crop both in Argentina and Brazil. Start with Brazil, please.

Eric Snodgrass: Yeah. Well, I got a text message from our friend Matt Bennett the other day, and he's like, so is it really that big? And I was kinda like, what are you talking about, Matt? And I'm like, oh, the the crop in Brazil. Okay.

Now now I know. And and so I I, you know, I we started talking about it, and then the reality is is they got some key rains in the last ten days. And this is like us getting that desperately needed rain in in late June and early July for some of the crop that's been planted, you know, early or on time. And so the next couple of weeks, I I would just say don't really matter Even though it's gonna get a little drier east, I don't think it's gonna be that big of a deal. And I was just talking with a group of our team our economics team at, excuse me, Nutrien, and we were just looking at the NDVI data.

Mato Grosso right now is setting a new record high in NDVI. So that tells you how good that crop is, and that's why I think they're probably gonna start to see some adjustments back up. And I I don't do crop estimates like this, but I can I've just I'll talk about it. I wouldn't be surprised if we start hearing something close to one eighty on a national production number, 180,000,000 metric tons out of Brazil in soybeans.

Todd Gleason: That would be the first time they've ever reached that number. That's a big one. How about in Argentina?

Eric Snodgrass: Argentina struggled earlier, but we've gotten better and better news and watched, you know, watched radar and watched satellite and seen some better moisture get into place. So from Cordoba, you know, over to Santa Fe back down to Buenos Aires, that that's a really important triangle down there. I think things are good. And Northern Argentina is going over wet, And that's very atypical for a La Nina. So this kinda tells you that maybe this La Nina, which looks strong now, is gonna fade fast like it did in, you know, some of those previous years we just mentioned.

Todd Gleason: Okay. Hey. Thank you much. I appreciate it. We'll talk to you not next week or following week, but in the New Year, I think probably on the eighth or ninth, something like that.

Eric Snodgrass: Alright. Well, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Todd Gleason: The same to you, Eric. That's Eric Snodgrass. He is with Nutrien Ag Solutions and Deggable joined us on this Friday edition of the closing market report that comes to you from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org.