Todd Gleason: From the land to Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois. This is the closing market report for the March 2026. I'm extensions. Todd Gleason coming to you today from Washington, Illinois in the Midwest Covers and Grains Conference put on by the Practical Farmers of Iowa. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Greg Johnson.

He's a TGM. Bill Whipples will join us from Whipples Hybrids. He's attending the conference today here in Washington, and then we'll turn our attention to the weather forecast. We'll do that with Drew Lerner at World Weather Incorporated in Kansas City. All on this Wednesday edition of the closing market report from Illinois Public Media.

It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org.

announce: Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.

Todd Gleason: Greg Johnson from TGM, that's totalgrainmarketing.com now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Greg, thank you for being, by the way, at yesterday's all day. I got look at the Beef House in Covington, Indiana. About 170, 75 in the room. It was just a it was a really good conference.

I say that as the one who helped to organize it or organized it, but it just felt really well attended, lot of great questions, and there was just so much good interaction and information all day long. I'm just surprised by how well it went.

Greg Johnson: Well, kudos to you. I mean, it's obvious that you've been doing this for a while. You've got the right, well, not the right, but you've got a good mix of panelists. You've got experts from different areas that, people wanna hear about. I mean, we have questions and and you've got people that can answer those questions.

So I I think that's why people come out to, to the all day ag outlook.

Todd Gleason: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I find most engaging about that day is that I just sort of sat back and let the audience run the questions, and they do. It helps that they got really good hats yesterday when

Greg Johnson: they asked a question,

Todd Gleason: But but they they asked a lot of good questions. You've sat on the soybean panel. What do you think of that panel and and the information that came out?

Greg Johnson: Well, I I didn't think we were as negative. A lot of times, we we get told told afterwards that we were negative, but I think we had reasons to think that beans could go higher or could go lower. I think there's a lot of things that can move this market, but the bottom line is we've already rallied over a dollar from where we were back in the fall. So I understand farmers always want a little bit more, but this isn't a bad price. And in a market like this where there's so much uncertainty, I mean, how long will this Middle East tension go on?

What will the policy be on RVOs and other renewables? I mean, there's so many unknown policy issues that there's just no way to have an answer on. You almost have to look at, can you make money at these levels? It's not so much price forecasting as it is just trying to lock in a profit. And I think that's the message that came across yesterday is have a marketing plan, sell at profitable levels, and if the market goes higher, you probably got more bushels to sell if it does.

Todd Gleason: You're of the opinion that profitable levels are now.

Greg Johnson: When you throw and I'm cheating a little bit. I'm throwing in some government money. I think that with the bridge money and the ARC PLC money, I think that should make a lot of people, maybe not everyone, but a lot of people, that should put them in the green instead of the red. So yes, guess I think that beans, beans anyway, are profitable. I don't think corn is near as profitable as as what the beans are, so I've been a little bit more reluctant to encourage people to sell corn.

But, anytime you can get $11 cash beans, I think that's, for new crop beans, I think that's not a bad place. I think you can make money there.

Todd Gleason: You went to the place that I was headed, which was that the caveat being that you're you're offsetting losses, at least at the moment in corn, and trying to give yourself some cushion to make it through this season and wait for higher prices for corn.

Greg Johnson: Yeah, and corn, new crop corn especially, has rallied. We rallied 30¢ from the January 12 crop report when December corn was 4.45. We got up to almost 4.75 yesterday. Now we're $0.7 off the high, but I still think there's reason to think that corn can get back to 4.75 and even go a little bit higher. The input costs are just so much higher for corn.

I think we'll see 5,000,000 less acres of corn. And now with the tensions in The Middle East, some of that fertilizer urea may not make it to The United States in a timely fashion. So that's gonna keep input costs even higher. So that should mean less corn acres and probably more bean acres. So that's another reason to get some beans sold and maybe to be a little bit patient on corn.

Todd Gleason: Are you thinking 94 or 93,000,000 acres for corn?

Greg Johnson: 94. That's about the five year average. It could be lower than that, but, I think just to plan 94,000,000 is pretty reasonable at this stage of the game.

Todd Gleason: And are you at 85 or 86 for soybean?

Greg Johnson: 85. 85 planted, 84 harvested, use the trend yield, the record yield of this past year at 53. And that gets you, depending on the demand side of the equation, that gets the carryout a little bit higher than this year's $350,000,000 It gets it closer to $400,000,000 So again, unless we have a weather problem, which we very well could, but without a weather problem and without some mandated demand, which again could happen. Like I say, there's a lot of unknowns, but just assuming normal demand and a normal crop, the carryout should increase a little bit in soybeans. As we all know, Brazil is waiting in the wings to plant another million or 2,000,000 more acres of beans this coming year than what they planted this year.

So, yeah, I I like getting beans sold. I'd like to be a little bit more defensive in in beans than I am in corn at this point.

Todd Gleason: Are you fearful that next Tuesday USDA will show a larger crop coming out of South America in total for soybeans?

Greg Johnson: No, I don't think so. I think it's been dry down in Southern Brazil. Excuse me, the Rio Grande do Sol area, Southern Argentina. So I think you could actually see the USDA lower the crop, at at the very least, keep it unchanged. I mean, they're at one eighty.

Some of the privates are at one seventy eight, one seventy nine. So they could come down a million metric tons, or they could leave it unchanged, but I don't think they'll increase it at all.

Todd Gleason: That, of course, would be with the world ag supply and demand estimates released monthly. They come out Tuesday next week at 11AM. Any other changes you're thinking that might show up in that what is generally a pretty nonevent release for USDA.

Greg Johnson: Nope. I I think the soybean number, out of South America might be the only number that that will change at this point. I think that's the only thing that, we probably got clarification on that we didn't have a month ago. So that's probably the only number I I look to to see any kind of change at all coming out of.

Todd Gleason: On the rally that just happened, did farmers take advantage for making old crop sales?

Greg Johnson: Yes. Yes. Farmers have done a very good job of selling old crop beans all along. Of course having $11 in front of that price helps. But we've seen farmers reward this market on old crop corn.

We haven't had quite the rally on old crop corn that we've had on new crop corn. New crop corn's rallied 30¢, the old corn has lost or has gained just 25, and we've lost a little bit more on this setback here in the last couple of days on the old crop corn than we did on the new crop corn. And again, that makes sense, Less corn acres, so there's less pressure for farmers to sell new crop at this point, but they're sitting on a lot of old crop corn. And, I think they took advantage and made some sales on this most recent rally, which I think is the right thing to do. And consequently, basis weakened?

Basis is, actually hanging in there. Export sales continue to be very good. And when I say farmers are selling, not all farmers are selling. So it's not a a a big enough wave of farmers selling to pressure the basis. So we've actually seen basis levels firm up, especially as we switched over from bidding versus the March to now bidding versus the May futures.

Todd Gleason: That'll be interesting to watch as we go through March. What are your expectations?

Greg Johnson: I I think we'll see basis continue to improve, 3 to 4¢ a month. I think there's plenty of old crop corn out there. So there's carry in the market and the function of the market is to make sure that just enough moves every month to keep the pipeline full, but not too much because we know that there's old crop corn out there that could really hit the market hard. I think the market's gonna just try to regulate it out and we'll wait to see what happens out of The Middle East and with these input prices and everything else.

Todd Gleason: My next question was about the impact of the conflict in The Middle East. We're a few days into that now. The market sometimes projects early what might be taking place. Has it settled at this point? I know there can be surprises, but do you think crude oil has settled down yet?

Greg Johnson: Crude oil's up 25% since the first of the year, and I think that might be enough for now. I mean, you have to take an opinion, and that's my opinion. But even today, there's talk that operatives from Iran have reached out to operatives from The United States to try to maybe do some negotiating to see if they can get this thing to come to an end. I'm sure that's in the interest of both sides to try to get this war stopped as quickly as possible. So whether that can happen or not, we'll find out.

But yeah, I think with the run up crude oil up 25%, soybean oil up 20% since the first of the year, A lot of this is already baked into the to the market, I think.

Todd Gleason: Thank you much, Greg, and thanks for coming yesterday. I really appreciate it.

Greg Johnson: Hey. Thank you, Todd.

Todd Gleason: That is Greg Johnson. He is with TGM. That's totalgrainmarketing.com. Well, as you know, I'm at the Midwest Covers and Grains Conference in Washington outside of Peoria, Illinois today. Sometimes you just don't know who it is that you run into at these conferences.

Here's one of those people.

Bill Wyffels: My name is Bill Wyffels, and I'm from Geneseo, Illinois. I'm part owner of Wiffles Hybrids, and I'm retired. I worked there from 1970 to 2017. And so today, I'm living and doing some things that, have a small farming operation and, also some, beef cattle that, I have. We should explain.

Small farming operation is under 500 acres? Yeah. It's about 450 acres. And just recently, I've turned the row crop acres over to my youngest son who's going to be operating that land. However, I've kept some pasture ground and actually as a father, I do a little coaching along the ways too as he's starting that process.

Why are you here in Washington, Illinois at a practical farmers of Iowa event focused on cover crops. Yeah. So I'm interested in the use of cover crops, the biology that's associated with it, and in a sense, not only for real crop land, but in particular for beef cattle operation, how how does that application put you in a position where maybe you can graze crop ground that is planted as well as pasture ground possibly ten months or more out of the year as opposed to the capital cost of running machinery and equipment for build hay or forages and things such as that.

Todd Gleason: So you'll be hearing about some of that during the day, probably will have to do with rotational pasture and moving cattle around on these on these properties. Are you prepared for those sorts of things and the kinds of labor that it will take and or do you think your son can manage all of that?

Bill Wyffels: Yeah. So I have a I have a kind of a partner other than my son that I work with on the cattle operation and just recently applied for NRCS equip application for cattle collars. I have been using rotational grazing, setting up three and five acre grids and moving cattle around 75 to 80 acres of pasture ground from May to October. And so with cattle collars, you know, I'm not as spry as I used to be. So I'm really intrigued with those, and hopefully we have the ability to put that application on the beef cattle.

Todd Gleason: That'll be interesting to see if that works. Those are electric kind of gates, relatively speaking. You're not actually have fencing up, but the cattle are by the beeps where they can go and not go.

Bill Wyffels: That's right. I've been to a couple different seminars like this today where one of the collars that I'm really interested is NoFence, which works off of cellular data. And so and I've got great cellular access in the geographic area that I live. And that'll allow us to potentially move them around more frequently, maybe get them into areas where they would graze more of the pasture area and recently have put up good five and six wire barbed wire fence. You know, I tore it out when I was 30 years old, now I'm putting it back in.

And so I you know, with those perimeter fencing and I've got a good source for water, hopefully, that we'll even get greater application of that. And then, you know, where the cattle are wintering right now is on some sandy irrigated cornstalk ground. And we've been using a single roll up wire to keep them in, but, you know, a deer runs through that with collars, you know, you'd know where they're at at least and potentially maybe they'll stay in as opposed to following through where that deer went. Okay.

Todd Gleason: So let's talk a little bit about your use of cover crops. How long have you been doing that? And do you use a mix? Are you cover cropping both with corn and soybeans, mostly going into soybeans? How do you do it?

Bill Wyffels: Well, I don't have a lot of experience. However, I've used triticale a couple of different times. One time, we got it seeded with a drill, and we made a lot of bales of wet forage with it. Currently, I've seeded triticale again in an area on about 25 acres, and I'm hoping to graze it this spring before we plant row crops on that ground. And it's kind of a sacrifice area before we turn the cows into the pasture ground in May.

However, you know, the direction heading is maybe to take 70 acres that's half corn and half soybeans, use a cover crop on the different kinds of crops on the ground that's going to go to corn the next year and what's going to go to soybeans the next year. I'm still trying to figure out what's going to be the best crop to do that. You know, listening this morning, the speaker's really talking a lot more about what's below the ground and the number of roots that you can put down and the different types of crops you can do. There's a lot of tricks to this to a certain extent in being successful. How early do you get it planted?

You know, I've been most successful using a drill. I flew some stuff on one time, wasn't particularly pleased with that, but hopefully the we're gonna learn some things here on different mixes.

Todd Gleason: Thank you much, and I appreciate you taking time with me today.

Bill Wyffels: That's my pleasure. Thanks a lot, Todd.

Todd Gleason: That was Bill Wiffles. He is a part owner of Wiffles Hybrids and attending the practical farmers of Iowa's Midwest Covers and Grains Conference in Washington, Illinois. I'm afraid meteorologist Drew Lerner is away from the office today and not available to us. We'll take a quick look at the weather forecast. In the immediate area, temperatures for the daytime should climb between now and Friday, topping out around 75 degrees on that day.

There will be a chance of rainfall today, tomorrow, and Friday as well, and then we'll return to sunny skies. Highs in the sixties over the weekend locally. Taking a look at some of the growing regions in South America will begin in, Brazil where temperatures are topping around 85 to 90 this week. They have rainfall Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, a 60% chance that in the primary growing regions of Vato Grosso in the Center West part of that nation in Rosario, Argentina, A little bit of rainfall, maybe a chance tomorrow and again on Friday. Highs in the mid to upper eighties.

That's a quick look at the weather forecast here on Illinois Public Media. Let's continue now our Midwest Covers and Grains Conference conversations. Nathan Johannine is here. He's from University of Illinois Extension. Hi, Nathan.

Thanks for being with us. You talked to the folks here about some seeding rate trials that you have been doing. Tell me what those are and how they proceeded.

Nathan Johanning: Sure, Todd. No, what we have is that I'm presenting on today is looking at some work we did in partnership with Illinois Soybean Association. We're looking at cereal rye ahead of soybeans and we looked at three different planting dates in the fall, like early October, mid and then like early November and then we also looked at four different seeding rates anywhere from of course we also had a no cover and then thirty, sixty, ninety and one hundred and twenty pounds of cereal rye. Looking at that gamut, how does it influence seeding rates and timing, how do they kind of work together? So we also then looked at planting dates for both Bolanza and Crimson clover which could be used ahead of corn or planted after soybeans in the rotation.

So that's a little high level of what we're looking at. As we looked at the soybeans and the cereal rye, one of the interesting things we saw a couple of things for one thing you'd suspect the earlier planting dates are definitely where we get more biomass. That was where we found that which you would expect to get more tillering, more branching. But the interesting part is that we could almost get very similar biomass even at our 30 pound rate was very comparable in some cases, even a little bit higher than what we get from our 120 pounds. So what it tells us, especially early, but even as we get into the mid part of the month, mid to say mid October in that fall planting season, even in November is that our seeding rates really didn't matter a whole bunch.

If you're in November, think going a little bit higher in seeding rate, maybe pushing that 60 pound range or so might give you a little benefit and there's some years if it was a little bit warm in November, even that didn't matter but I think it gives a lot of validity for planting in that thirty, sixty pound range of cereal rye and still getting very substantial amounts of biomass and you're not really gonna maximize your biomass much more by say planting an extra 30 or 60 pounds, say getting up to closer to that 100 pound range. So it's an interesting concept just because we're so used to planting small grains like wheat and in there, we're looking for a number of heads, right? We need, we're trying to get grain fill. Well, we're just trying to grow above ground biomass leaf stem material that plant can compensate a lot. So a lot of what we saw in those low seeding rates was a lot bigger stems, larger stem diameters, more tillers because it didn't have the competition.

It may not, we didn't yield any of this. It may not maybe have yielded the same because maybe not all those were maybe profitable tillers as far as providing good fill of grain, but that didn't matter. We want growth to be a, to hold nutrients and to be that residue cover.

Todd Gleason: Cereal rye is the starting point you think for this transition to cover crops?

Nathan Johanning: Cereal rye is certainly a fundamental ahead of soy soybeans. That was kind of where we went, certainly ahead of corn. We were still working on some new projects, looking at other things with say mixtures, maybe low rates of grasses and then adding in some legumes but we're, I guess transitioning briefly here on our legumes. So we also learned when we looked at our Blanche and Crimson clover ahead of corn there, again, we really do need to get in a little earlier. I think for most of our sites, which range from Western To Southern Illinois and Central Illinois, getting in around mid October, we could still get in a decent stand of say Crimson Clover or Belanza Clover.

The Belanza actually would handle the cold a little better. If it was a little later, it would power through the winter a little better and Balansa clover can handle some of our wetter soils. Balansa clover can handle a little later and wetter conditions better soil conditions over the winter versus Crimson clover. So if you failed with crimson clover and you feel like you fall into that kind of soil category, maybe look at some of the other species.

Todd Gleason: Nathan, thank you. I appreciate it.

Nathan Johanning: Sure, no problem, Todd.

Todd Gleason: That's Nathan Johannan from University of Illinois Extension joined us here at the Midwest Covers and Grains Conference in Washington, Illinois on this Wednesday afternoon. You can hear him again if you'd like on our website at willag.org. That's willag.org. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason.