Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University at Urbana Champaign, Illinois. This is the Closing Market Report. It is the March 2026. I'm extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Kurt Kimmel.

He's at agmarket.net. We'll discuss, of what's been happening in The Middle East, how it is impacting crude oil and commodities. Then we'll turn our attention to the CDA or the Center for Digital Agriculture's annual conference taking place on campus today and discuss some very high level hard ability traits and how computer scientists on campus are using drones to find them and then we'll turn our attention to the weather forecast. We'll discuss what's been happening in The United States, South America and how traffic is being routed around the Horn Of Africa because the Strait Of Hormuz has been closed. We'll do that with Mark Russo of Everestream Analytics during this Monday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media.

It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willhe.org. Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. May corn for the day at $4.53 and 3 quarters, down six and three quarters of a cent. July 5 and a half lower, settled at $4.65 and a half. New crop December down two and three quarters.

It settled at $4.81 and three quarters. By the way, went to $4.98 and a half on its high for the day. May beans, $11.96 and a quarter, down 4 and a half cents. July at $12.00 9 down four. November beans, $11.48 and a quarter, a penny and a half higher.

They were as high as $11.72 and a half for the day. Bean meal futures at $3.13 50 down $3.70 on their settlement price. Bean oil, 48¢ lower $66.10. Wheat futures, soft red at $6.00 3 and a quarter down 13 and a half cents. And the hard red, these are both the May contracts at $6.19 and three quarters down three and three quarters.

The new crop July soft red, by way, at $6.13 down 12 and a quarter cents. Live cattle futures in Chicago for the day at $4.42 and a half cents lower, $230.15. The settlement price feeders at $3.46 55 down $5.07 and a half cents, and lean hogs off 80¢ at $94.82 and a half. Crude oil on the WTI, $94.46. That's up $3.53 a barrel at this hour.

And the Brent crude. Oh, I don't have a number for the Brent crude. I was thinking I did. Oh, there it is. $98.70.

Don't usually read that. Kurt, $6.04 higher. Kurt Kimmel is here. He is with agmarket.net. Thanks for being with us, Kurt.

Okay. So crude oil under a $100 again. It pumped through around $1.20 over the weekend. Lots of things happening in The Middle East that are having an impact on the commodity markets, whether they be the livestock, the grains, and or, the metals and, of course, the energies. Tell me about what you've been watching.

Curt Kimmel: Giddy up fire horse, Todd. You know the drill here. Yes, sir. I tell you what. It it's just amazing how volatility just went through the roof here over the near term.

And, basically, crude oil trade almost $30 higher overnight, set the tone. We can't compete against a big hedge fund that has 24 staff or AI computer trading, they just went for it. And if they ended up buying the high, they might have to wait a little while to get out of that if things don't pan out. But what I picked up was the G7 countries were going to tap into their strategic oil reserves and if that's the case, think there's like 400,000,000 barrels that could be freed up to help take the edge off the slowdown in this oil through the strait there. But there are some Chinese or some ships starting to creep through there.

And if Iran and China are still on good terms, then these, Chinese oil vessels ought to be able to get through there. China is the biggest, recipient of oil, through that straight. Now when you look at the gas pump and the price going up, that's why, you know, we try to become, we are self sufficient on energy for the most part. Drill baby drill, you know, strategic oil reserve, this is a prime example where it could come in handy. Then plus two, I'm not quite for sure the long term plan included Venezuela oil production to come north if needed too.

So a lot of moving parts, a lot of uncertainty, huge, huge, huge price swings. Now the beneficiary of that was last night's trade where it pulled the grain market with uncertainty, raw commodities in general is a place to go and that's what we saw, big movement into the grain complex. Just no hardly selling, particularly in the overnight trade when most producers or not wanting to participate on Sunday evening in that move. So you had to have some open orders in there to take advantage of it. The biggest thing you can look at is pull up a price chart, go to your favorite price chart page and you'll see some huge price reversals to the downside.

We made some new highs here on the move, closed lower in most of the commodities, so they're going view the overnight highs fairly good, the resistance. Where we go from here, we were looking at May corn having some support here at this 4.49 area, Dees corn 4.73, May beans $11.75 November's $11.34 Those are kind of some key areas to try to hold. Failure to hold those levels could result into some further price deterioration to the downside, but extreme volatility, it's use extreme caution. We've gone to using some covered positions to give you a staying power so you can kind of sleep at night. The other thing tomorrow is the monthly supply demand report.

I don't see a whole lot of change there on The US number. The ag market team has their carryout corn one two thousand one hundred two that's down about 25,000,000 bushel beans unchanged at three fifty million bushels wheat unchanged at nine thirty one. As far as world numbers, that's probably where maybe we'll see some zigging and zagging on that Brazilian crop and Argentina crop, Todd.

Todd Gleason: And I would say that, from last week's All Day Ag Outlook, and this is a summary that Bloomberg took away from that and posted into their, Bloomberg outlooks, was that volatility, this would have been prior, of course, to, things really beginning to take place over this weekend, but that volatility would be high for commodities. Supply in The United States and around the planet will be high, and they also suggested the demand might lag, in some part. I'm I'm not certain that that's where you would land, but at least that supply, for most commodities remains really relatively pretty good, and it's a distribution problem more than anything else.

Curt Kimmel: It could be. I I mean, there'd be some countries wanna have supply on hand in case things really escalate. It's like a snowstorm coming. Everybody goes to the grocery store, so that could have some pent up demand. But it only happens once in a while in a lifetime and I remember the early eighties real well, we had a stock's yeast ratio in corn, 50%, stock's yeast ratio on soybeans, almost 50%, wheat stock's yeast ratio is 100%.

It was mathematically and physically impossible, for the grain market to go up. Well, in '87 demand picked up, '88 drought, we went zooming to the upside so even though we've got ample supplies, this market can do just about anything, Todd.

Todd Gleason: Yeah. Don't give up on the fire horse, I suppose.

Curt Kimmel: Yes, sir. We're gonna ride that, baby. We might get bucked off a time or two, but we're gonna have the opportunity here to continue to reward the market as we go, Todd.

Todd Gleason: Alright. Thank you much. I appreciate it. You have a good week.

Curt Kimmel: Take care.

Todd Gleason: You too. That's Kurt Kimmel. He is with agmarket.net, joined us on this Monday afternoon to talk about the marketplace. You can hear that again if you'd like on our website. We're at willag.org.

Artificial intelligence is changing how we see the world and how we look at the crops in our fields. And while agriculture has long used light reflection to gauge basic plant health, new AI tools are taking this technology a massive step forward. Associate professor of computer sciences here on the University of Illinois campus, Mohamed El Kabir, made a presentation this morning at the Annual Center for Digital Agriculture Conference. I spoke with him about newly developed methods that use drones and AI to decode plant genetics from the sky, hunting for hidden, highly heritable traits that could build better, stronger crops for the future. You were talking about something really pretty interesting to me this morning as it's related to artificial intelligence and using it to decode genetics of existing plants.

And you, in this case, are using light reflection to figure this out. So most producers and others will be familiar with NDVI, as, you know, how green is the continent and how much do we think that means for yield for corn. In this case, you're able to use some known genetic markers and what their reflection, I think, looks like from the light and then to be able to hunt down new kinds of heritable or highly heritable genetics. Give me a broad overview Sure. And then we'll talk more.

Mohammed El-Kebir: Sure. That sounds good. So NDVI, so that's something that's well studied. And it basically is you have a, like you said, like a light reflective spectrum and NDVI only uses like two bands out of that spectrum, puts them in a formula and it gives you something about how green a specific plant is or a specific region in a in a satellite image. What we wanted to do is can we find new indices beyond NDVI, beyond other vegetation indices that have been, you know, studied before.

And the way we wanted to do that is we actually wanted to use heritability as as a as a guide. So we wanted to find new indices, what we call synthetic traits that have high heritability. And this actually corresponds to finding new traits from high throughput phenotyping data because it doesn't have to be only light reflectance. It can be any kind of high throughput phenotyping data. It can be mass spectrometry.

It can be whatever you want it to be. And we and the key idea is because this is such a massive in general, high throughput phenotyping data is very massive, very large scale. And the key idea is can we use heritability as a way to effectively mine the interesting parts of the data.

Todd Gleason: And you're using the AI to do the mining? Correct. Correct. How does that happen?

Mohammed El-Kebir: Yeah. So that's that's that's that's what we had to develop. So we had to develop a new because there was no off the shelf AI that does this. So we had to develop a new method that does this, and we call our method h two, standing for heritability opt optimization. And, yeah, we needed to come up with new mathematics to do that, and there were two key ingredients.

I'll I'll just mention them very high level. So first, we had to ensure that the indices vegetation indices that we find, that they actually come from a function class that is differentiable in its parameters. So this can be a linear model. It can be a neural network. It can be anything.

So it's a very mild restriction. And then the second thing that we had to do is the heritability computation itself also had to be heritable sorry, had to be differentiable. That one is a little bit tricky, but we managed to, you know, develop an algorithm that accomplishes both requirements. And because of that, we could actually optimize heritability and find new traits that maximize heritability.

Todd Gleason: What will you hunt for first? Or what are the things do you think that might be valuable to agriculture? Or maybe you're just in the fun stage of it, and what have you found?

Mohammed El-Kebir: I think I think we're very much in the I think we're always in a fun stage with research. So what we found so far so it cannot only be fun, so you also have to find something that is relevant. So we did a couple validation studies. So specifically for sorghum, we had manual labels that were also generated using classical non high throughput phenotyping techniques. And what we found was that our new traits that we identify using our new method actually sometimes captures some of those existing manual traits, but also finds completely new things.

And then the second question that we ask ourselves, those completely new traits that we identify, what what do they actually correspond to? Like, how can we understand their genetics better? So what we did is we actually went back to the the SNP genotyping data, and we tried to find associations between SNPs and our new traits. And we did indeed find some, yeah, some hits. So so that's that's very interesting.

So it does show that there's, like, genetic basis, you know, that that our traits are indeed genetically driven. So going forward, I think to actually really do this at scale and to identify what our new traits really correspond to, we need lots of we need lots of plants. We need lots of individuals. So right now, the data that we've looked at, it's only a small number of plants, relatively small. So we can improve our interpretation of the new traits by having more plants.

So that's that's that's kind of like what we want to do going forward.

Todd Gleason: I'm going to summarize this. Let me see if I can get it right. So essentially, you're using light reflection, artificial intelligence, a set of marker traits of some sort that you know what the real light reflection is like to see if there are highly heritable traits within a series of plants, usually using a drone so it's close so you can see the plants. You don't know what those heritable traits do and you can then turn around and use snippets of the DNA that exist to go hunt them down Correct. To see what these highly heritable traits that we probably have no idea how they are working Yeah.

Or what they do are and possibly if they can be used and manipulated in the future Correct. To make a crop better.

Mohammed El-Kebir: Yes. That's correct. Yes.

Todd Gleason: Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time with me, Mohammed.

Mohammed El-Kebir: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you very much.

Todd Gleason: That was associate professor of computer sciences, Mohammed El Kabir. He spoke at this morning's CDA or Center for Digital Ag conference. He says as researchers continue to scale up this AI technology to scan thousands of plants at once, they're hopeful it will fast track the development of more resilient and higher yielding crops. Let's check-in on the growing regions across the planet with Mark Russo now. He's at Everestreem Analytics and has a look at the weather forecast.

Hi, Mark. Thanks for being with us on a Monday again. Let's start in The United States. Begin with the rainfall in the Midwest and kinda work your way back, through the Western Corn Belt from the East Side, please.

Mark Russo: Yeah, Todd. With recent rains across, the Midwest, that started last week, continued over the weekend. We've seen overall rainfall amounts ranging anywhere from one to two inches on the lower end of the range to some areas picking up six, seven inches of rain. And with the rain activity here pretty evenly distributed across both the Western Corn Belt and the Eastern Corn Belt, again with most areas in that range of one to two inches to as much as six, seven inches. And that actually expands all the way down through much of the Delta Region as well.

So all in all, it's been a very wet start to March, and that's been needed to help boost soil moisture and boost river levels here as we begin to head towards the new growing season.

Todd Gleason: And as you look forward?

Mark Russo: Yeah, we see more rain on the way here. The pattern stays active. Likely not as widespread heavy rains coming up compared to what it has been, and much of this is due to we have cooler weather returning over the upcoming weekend and next week. But all in all, some additional precip systems coming through and further improvement in water resources.

Todd Gleason: Anything in The United States that you're concerned about?

Mark Russo: Well, we are watching the plains hard red winter wheat belt situation. Those areas here have trended drier and look to stay on the dry side with no meaningful rainfall over the next two weeks. Also, temperatures look to stay warmer than normal there. So, evaporation rates are quite high, and that will draw down soil moisture as we move through the next several weeks. So, not a big problem now, but definitely something to monitor.

Todd Gleason: Would you define it as a typical transition from winter to spring?

Mark Russo: It's been quite volatile, which this is the time of year where when volatility does increase with temperatures and precip trends. But overall, it's been a bit more extreme or that volatility has been amplified a bit here due to what we're seeing with this kind of clash of anomalous air masses. Still the the bitterly cold air to the north in the Northern US and Canada, but then also this anomalously warm and very humid air mass that moved into much of the Southern And Central US.

Todd Gleason: Is the bitter cold likely to return at all?

Mark Russo: We don't see the big time cold coming back in. But coming up this weekend and next week, temperatures will be dropping back down to slightly cooler than normal levels across the Midwest and much of the Eastern half of the country. But the most anomalous cold still looks to stay up north. Upper Upper Great Lakes into Canada is the main area with no indication that that plunges all the way south down to the Gulf Coast.

Todd Gleason: Turn your attention to South America. What are crops like there for the day and the weather forecast?

Mark Russo: Yeah, crops continue to be in good shape, whether that's late developing corn and soybeans in Argentina, or late developing soybeans in Far Southern Brazil and Rio Grande do Sul. Buenos Aires province in Argentina has been drier lately, but they have opportunities coming up to boost soil moisture and either stabilize or improve crop conditions there. And then for soybean harvesting, safrinha corn planting, and overall crop transportation across Brazil and parts of Argentina, the outlook looks favorable. We see no sign of any excessively wet patterns that would bog things down, whether that's for road and rail networks here in Brazil or at port operations as well.

Todd Gleason: And before I let you go, because you work for a logistics company and handle the weather, I'm wondering when you look at shipping traffic that would normally go through the Strait Of Hormuz that has to be routed around the Horn Of Africa. Are there issues that they'll be facing?

Mark Russo: Yeah. We do see issues at times here across that area and around South Africa in the Gate Of Goodhorn. Over the next week to ten days, overall, weather conditions won't be extreme. There will be gusty winds at times, but at least the pattern is relatively tranquil over the next week to ten days. But this just follows some very stormy weather here just over the past week.

And we've even seen big disruptions in around areas of, like, Durban and Richards Bay in South Africa. And as we head towards basically April, May, June, and beyond, that tends to be the time frame of a biggest storm and rough sea risk in around that part of the globe where more shipments are being taken now.

Todd Gleason: Hey. Thanks much. I appreciate it.

Mark Russo: You're welcome.

Todd Gleason: Mark Russo is with Avastream Analytics and joined us on this Monday edition of the Closing Market Report that came to you from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world. Our theme music is written, performed, produced in courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason. Don't forget to visit our website. The address is willag.org.

That's willag.org where you can find information from the ag economist, the crop scientist, and the animal scientist right here on the Urbana Champaign campus of the University of Illinois along with our daily radio programming. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Doctor. JACKSON: