Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois. This is the Closing Market Report for the 24th day of March  2026. I'm extension's Todd Gleason. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Naomi Blooms. She's at totalfarmmarketing.com.

We'll turn our attention to ForgeBee. That's a brand new entrepreneurial startup located in Research Park here on campus and dedicated to helping pollinators feed the planet. And then we'll turn our attention to the weather forecast. We'll talk with Don Day as we wrap up our time together. He's a day weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming on this Tuesday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media.

Our theme music is written, performed, produced in courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer, Tim Gleason. Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. May corn for the day settled at 462.5, three higher July at 472.5 up two and December corn 2.5 higher today it finished at $4.89 May soybeans 11.55 down 8.5¢ July 1171 and a half, seven and a half lower. And November beans at $11.43 and three quarters. That's a bushel, down two and three quarters for the new crop.

Bean meal, $4.20 lower. The bean oil up 15¢. Soft red winter wheat in the July at $6.02, up two for the day the hard red July, the harvest month there at $6.19 and 3 quarters. It finished a penny and a half higher on this Tuesday afternoon. Naomi Bloom from Total Farm Marketing now joins us to take a look at what's been happening in the world of commodity markets.

Hi, Naomi. Looks like it was kind of a quiet day in trade. That's new, actually, but it was really pretty quiet.

Naomi Blohm: Yeah. Absolutely. Taking the cues from outside markets, having a relatively quiet day in crude oil, about a $5 trading range. Corn had about a 6¢ range today, with the beans about a 13¢ range and the wheat market and about a 15¢ range overall. So not not too much fresh news today.

We're regurgitating old news. I think we're seeing some positions squaring ahead of two things coming up. You know, there's hope that, later this week, we will maybe get some news on the RVO and SRE's clarity, at the White House event on Friday. But, you know, they said it might take until the March, so we're waiting for that. And then, of course, waiting for the acreage report on March 31.

Todd Gleason: That would be next Tuesday. Let's start with the RVOs or the renewable volume obligations and the SRE, the small refinery exemptions, what is it that the trade is hoping for so that we have some kind of idea when those are announced, what direction the marketplace might head?

Naomi Blohm: Yeah. And I'll be honest, I'm not I'm not totally sure, but I'm thinking that we just want clarity as far as are we gonna have a number and stick with it, or they're gonna have wiggle room to kick the can down the road, which feels like has happened in, the past. So we're looking for concrete numbers, and they've hinted like we're gonna actually see some concrete numbers, but what will that be is the question, and of course that is gonna affect future demand, and it could set us up for new demand for the future, or it could just be kind of that continuation of current demand with slight increases in the short term. So, I don't know. I guess my thought is they'll do something concrete but like a little bit of a baby step, and I don't think we're getting anything over the top exciting.

Todd Gleason: So that would either be by Friday, which is, the celebration of agriculture and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States, which will take place on, the White House Lawn. And then as you mentioned, on Tuesday of next week at 11AM central time, USDA will release the prospective plantings report and the quarterly grain stocks number. Let's start with the prospective plantings report. We'll use the USDA numbers to begin with. They were 94,000,000 acres for corn, 85,000,000 acres for soybeans.

Where do you think the trade is at today, or maybe better, where is Total Farm Marketing putting their numbers?

Naomi Blohm: Yeah. So I would say with that corn acre number, so of course last year we were at 98.8. I'm thinking it's probably going to be closer to 95, personally. I I do think we'll see the shift to lower, but from what I've talked to with guys, they for the most part, they have some of their anhydrous book. They're feeling confident with fertilizer.

They've, recognized the prices that we've had recently with corn getting up near the $5 handle, and and they are kind of comfortable with some of that. So I do think corn down, to 95, maybe not that 94 number that the USDA was talking about. And on the soybean side, of course, last year we were at $81.02, and I would guess that we'll see about a 3,000,000 acre increase, taking it up to about, 84. So that's where my thoughts are. I'm really curious to see what happens with cotton acres in the South.

I'm curious to see some of the smaller grains. So things like, barley, things like oats, things like, things like sorghum where, like in portions of the Dakotas where the soybean basis has not been attractive, do they go back to some of those, I would say call more of a nontraditional crop with barley or spring wheat? And in the South, with cotton prices not being overly attractive, do they go and plant, Milo, something like that? So there's there could be a lot of little surprises on here. Usually, the March 31 report does have some sort of surprise, and we can see some market price response in either direction.

Todd Gleason: Now turn your attention to that grain stocks number, Naomi, because the middle two grain stocks are the second and third quarter figures. Sometimes the ag economists say can be really wonky. The first one is really pretty good. The middle two are a little wonky. What are you expecting out of it?

Naomi Blohm: Well, we're all curious to see. I think, my curiosity is is with corn and wheat in terms of our exports being so strong. Are the quarterly grade stocks gonna be a little bit lower than expected, which could be supportive for prices? And then also, of course, very curious on the soybeans where we've had just such strong crush demand, but very modest export demand. And what does that look like in terms of the quarterly stocks?

So two big aspects of the March 31 reports, and both do need to be looked at closely as it does set now the new cornerstone for price activity for second quarter.

Todd Gleason: Hey. Thanks much. We'll talk with you again next week.

Naomi Blohm: Thank you.

Todd Gleason: That's Naomi Bloom. She is with totalfarmmarketing.com. Today we're going to explore a different kind of agricultural company. It's called ForgeBee. It has developed a system to allow the manufacture of single use units of highly efficient honeybees for pollination in place of full sized colonies.

Its founders say this is more cost effective and resource efficient than the current model. We'll explore why that's the case in a moment, but first we need to talk about where this new company is coming into being. Enterprise Works. Enterprise Works is the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign's technology business incubator located in Research Park supporting science based startups that are commercializing disruptive technologies. It's a building, but more.

EnterpriseWorks provides resources to students, faculty, and community entrepreneurs, including laboratory and office spaces, mentorship, and assistance with grant opportunities. We've talked with Gene Robinson a couple of times over the years. He's a professor here on campus and among other titles is the director of the bee research facility. And we know from him that over the past twenty five years, populations of honeybees across the country have been declining. There are issues with disease, there are issues with pesticides, issues with parasitic mites, and even poor nutrition.

All of these, he says, are weakening bees. This is a problem for crops which need to be pollinated by honeybees. So Gene Robinson and his colleague, a former student turned CEO, Adam Hamilton, have developed a solution, and EnterpriseWorks is helping them create a company around it. Here's Gene.

Gene Robinson: Yes, so we are developing a way to rear honeybees in the laboratory so that they are free of disease and free of parasites so that they have a better chance to do a good job of pollinating out in out in the field.

Todd Gleason: So, Adam, you had this company up called ForgeBeam that does this process. How important was it the enterprise center, the building that houses companies like yours on campus that are entrepreneurial? How important has that been to its beginning success rate?

Adam Hamilton: So as the name suggests, the incubator is there to help the company grow. And we started off very small. You know, I was the first employee for almost and only employee for almost a year. And without Enterprise Works there, I think we would have really stumbled as we were taking those first steps from academia into the the business world. But whenever we got hung up on anything, Enterprise Works and the staff there and the the mentors of the entrepreneur in residence program, they were there to to help us from from falling down when we were trying to address problems that coming from academia we'd never faced before.

And that was really critical for for our early success.

Todd Gleason: Things like what? What's a what's a single example that you can come up with that where you just ran into a wall and they helped?

Adam Hamilton: So one of the most important things an early stage entrepreneur has to learn is how to communicate what they're doing and how to position themselves so that they can attract interest and funding. And Enterprise Works was essential in helping us develop those skills because coming from academia, we want to talk all about the science, how the nitty gritty details of what we're doing and how we're doing it. And that's not necessarily the focus that needs to be taken when interacting with people who are are going to be, supporting ForgeBee in in other avenues.

Todd Gleason: This leads me, and I think the pitch that you probably used will be more accessible to the general audience to the question of what is forge bee and really how do you put those into the world so that they are successful in helping the planet feed itself? What we

Adam Hamilton: really want to do is create a totally new source of bees that beekeepers can take advantage of to produce healthy bees whenever and wherever they're needed. We want to use robotics for this. Jean alluded to the fact that we're bringing the bees into the lab from the outside environment where they're constantly dealing with these myriad of stressors. Using robotics, we can make healthy bees which can then be shipped out to growers in disposable units. And we can manipulate the behavior of the bees so that they basically become super foragers for the amount of time that they're needed for crop pollination.

Then at the end of the day, we can take these disposable units and recycle them with a new batch of bees for a new growing cycle because most crops only bloom for about two to three weeks at a time. And the way beekeepers handle this is they truck their own colonies vast distances, thousands of miles across the country each year. They'll start in Texas and Florida, then they'll ship them to California at the first blush of spring to pollinate almonds. After the almond pollination, again, only two to three weeks long, they'll ship them to Washington or North Dakota or Oregon for different crops back to the Midwest and then finally to the overwintering areas. And this migratory pollination is very stressful for the honeybees.

It travel itself, and it also brings them into areas of high population density where these different diseases can be transmitted very readily. And so what we want to do is create a novel paradigm for that system where bee where beekeepers can basically produce the bees on-site whenever and wherever they're needed, use the bees for pollination, and then pick up and move the means of production itself to a new location.

Todd Gleason: Interesting. So the robotics are used how?

Gene Robinson: What do they do? The robotics are used to feed the baby bees. Baby bees have to get attended to very, very often and in very intricate ways. And the robotics allows us to do that in the laboratory at scale. We want to be producing millions and millions of bees to be able to be super pollinators.

Todd Gleason: And how is it that they become super foragers?

Adam Hamilton: So this actually harkens back to my PhD thesis, which was on the molecular basis of division of labor. And I know that's a mouthful. But basically what I was looking at is how bees decide what jobs they're going to do within the colony. Bees specialize in very specific tasks over the course of their lifespan and they can change these tasks based on what the colony is experiencing and how they're communicating with each other. And so what we're doing is harnessing our knowledge about the molecular basis for this in order to push them to do certain jobs.

So we can use a cocktail of neurochemicals, hormones, and pheromones to say to the bees that, hey, you need to forage right now. And they'll listen to that signal, and they'll go out and forage more readily than they would otherwise.

Todd Gleason: So I just have a couple of follow-up questions. You raise the bees here. You provide a hive to the end user where they grow out the foragers that they need from that hive that's located there, if I'm not mistaken.

Adam Hamilton: Not quite. So maybe it'd be best if I could explain the entire system in in full detail. So we have three technological pillars. The first is a device that allows us to bring the queen inside into the laboratory from a normal colony. We call it the queen monitoring cage.

And this cage is only a few inches wide and a few inches tall. And we can keep her with a small number of bees and monitor her using artificial intelligence machine vision and provide for the the cage using robotics. And so this keeps the queen safe from all of the different factors that might impact her health, and she'll lay eggs inside of these devices. We can easily collect those eggs and put it into the robot that Gene was referencing earlier. We call it the bee factory.

And this is a liquid handling robot that will deposit diet to the larvae as they need it in order to grow from egg to adulthood. Once they're adults, and I should say that we can have of course total control of that diet, and so they're not suffering from poor nutrition and they're not going to be exposed to any diseases or especially the parasitic mites that feed on the larvae. Then once they're healthy adults, we can package them into disposable units without a queen and ship those off to beekeepers or growers for pollination purposes. And those will have a pollination cocktail, which is the suite of chemicals I mentioned earlier, that will essentially push all of the bees to forage. Now foraging bees live up for about two to three weeks, which matches very precisely with the amount of time that most plants bloom for.

And so at the end of a bloom, the foragers will have done their job. They'll have lived through their natural lifespan, and you can collect the, physical shell of the units and reuse it for future for future pollination events.

Todd Gleason: That's fascinating, and I understand that it seems to work. It seems like it should be just a magnificent way for those who need bees for a two to three week period to manage to get them, and you don't have to ship bees or very many live bees across The United States, the big colonies across The United States. Right.

Adam Hamilton: I just want to mention that we wanna go one step further, actually, eventually. As we perfect the system, we don't not only want to produce the bees ourselves, we wanna empower beekeepers to do the same thing so that they can use the same equipment that we're using to produce bees, for for pollination purposes on their own.

Todd Gleason: Finally, one last thing, because these bees are raised so that they're not exposed to the diseases and other issues. I suppose that probably two to three weeks may not be long enough for them to come into enough exposure for that to be an issue. However, regeneration seems to be I don't know whether it's an issue or it's a problem you've thought about long term if you suddenly become really I mean, if the business were to grow dramatically, what happens to the populations that are local to these areas?

Gene Robinson: Yeah, migratory beekeeping, which is what's currently practiced, is very stressful. It's another stressor on top of the ones that we talked about already. We're hoping that without the need to move colonies as much, the colonies that are kept in place more will be able to do better than those that have to move from place to place so many times.

Todd Gleason: Gene Robinson and Adam Hamilton believe Forgebee is a disruptive way to improve the health of honeybees across the nation while aiding producers of crops which require pollinators. Their company is located in the Enterprise Works Building at Research Park on the University of Illinois campus. The two are hopeful the ForgeBee technology will eventually aid in broader conservation efforts too, applying their lab rearing techniques to native and endangered pollinators like the rusty patched bumblebee. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Let's turn our attention to the weather forecast for The United States.

Now the growing regions, and we'll start, I think, Donday, in your part of the world there at day weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then come this way. What was the winter like there? And I'm asked this because I wanna know about snowpack as well, in the Rocky Mountains.

Don Day: Well, I tell you, this is the winter of the nonwinter. A lot of folks are calling it. You get into the West Central High Plains, west into the Rockies. It was one of the warmest, driest winters going back to either 1976 or 1977 or 1981. That's how far back we gotta go.

And we're likely I think it's a foregone conclusion that this will be the worst snowpack, since then, you know, going back fifty or sixty years. So there's big water concerns, coming into the, spring and summer season out West. Now one thing that can happen out west in April and May is you can catch up a little bit, but it was, not a great year if you were a skier in the West.

Todd Gleason: And that will have an impact through the Red River Basin. Is that correct?

Don Day: Well, it might. Yeah. I mean, we've probably heard about the wildfires in Nebraska and the part of the Dakotas. Some of those far eastern areas of the plains were part of that dryness. Although it does appear to be a a dividing line, really, you get central time zone west is where the biggest problems have been.

Todd Gleason: So let's talk about that western part of the central time zone or what we would reference, generally speaking, as the Western Corn Belt. Nebraska, the Dakotas, maybe parts of Minnesota, Kansas clearly as well. How dry is it?

Don Day: Well, you get it's really interesting. If you take the extreme eastern counties of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, those areas and Pointy's not bad with the precipitation, but west of that line, you get further west from Lincoln, you get further west from Saint, Sioux Falls and Omaha, that's where things get really dry. As you get out to places like Kearny, Grand Island, Nebraska, then Central And Western Kansas, that is where the dryness really has been this winter and not only dry but missing out on most of the cold for the winter as well and those areas desperately need April and May to come through for them because March certainly hasn't.

Todd Gleason: Okay, so there will be concern in even in my part of the world that once you have a drought it tends to spread. Do you think April and May will look better for them?

Don Day: Well, yes. However, I put an asterisk on that because we have seen so many times this winter season our our long range forecast, we call them our weekly that go out six weeks at a time. A lot of times have been advertising a change, advertising a change to weather conditions and they are. However, our confidence is low, lower than it has been just because of how bad the model performance has been this winter season. The one thing that we could say is that the weather patterns that have kind of locked in since November creating the weather that we've been in should start to release and not be as much of a driving factor as we get into spring and summer.

One thing that we can talk about the next time we talk is that the developing El Nino is gonna be a factor as we go into spring and summer as well.

Todd Gleason: We can do that. Thanks much. I appreciate it, Don.

Don Day: Thank you.

Todd Gleason: Don Day is with Day Weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming and helped us to wrap up this Tuesday edition of the Closing Market Report that came to you from Illinois Public Media. It's public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org. I'm extension's Todd Gleason.