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The October 15, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report opens with commodity market updates, noting lower closes for corn, soybeans, and wheat. Matt Bennett of AgMarket discusses completing harvest in central Illinois, rapid crop dry-down, local yield results, and current technical price pressures facing both corn and soybean futures. Jim McCormick highlights AgMarket's growth, including its rebrand and transition to becoming a guaranteed introducing broker clearing through StoneX, alongside its brokerage, consulting, and crop and livestock insurance services. A report from Stephanie Hoff and CoBank analyst Billy Roberts details how soaring cocoa prices, reduced sugar beet acreage, and pest pressures are pushing candy makers toward ingredient reformulation and smaller packages to combat consumer sticker shock. Finally, Mike Tannura of Tstorm Weather delivers an agricultural weather outlook, analyzing rain-delayed winter wheat planting in the Southern Plains, favorable harvest windows across the Corn Belt, and the broader impacts of a strong El Niño pattern on soil moisture and crops across Brazil and Argentina.

01:21 Ag Markets with Matt Bennett, AgMarket
06:42 AgMarket Grows, Rebrands, and has a new Clearing Firm
12:12 Candy Makers Grapple with Cocoa, Sugar Headwinds
16:32 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather

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Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 15th day of October 2026, I’m extensions Todd Gleason. Coming up we’ll talk about the commodity markets with Matt Bennett, he’s at AgMarket, and then we’ll turn our attention to the candy store, well the aisle actually, and how much chocolate candy might cost this year. You’ll be surprised by the input prices, and then we’ll turn our attention of course to the weather forecast too. We’ll do that with Mike Tannura at Tstorm Weather, at tstorm.net online, right here on this Thursday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org, that’s w-i-l-l-a-g-dot-o-r-g.

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

Todd Gleason: In Chicago corn futures finished down two to three for the day, soybeans were off around 14 cents, and the wheat futures for the afternoon finished down two to three cents for the day.

01:21 Ag Markets with Matt Bennett, AgMarket
Todd Gleason: Matt Bennett from AgMarket now joins us to take a look at the marketplace. Hi Matt, thanks for being with us. I’m wondering, last week I think you were pretty close to being finished up, have you completed harvest?

Matt Bennett: Yep, yeah, we got done there on Saturday actually, so, you know, once we got back into corn after finishing up the beans, you know, we realized quickly that we’re going to have to get to all of it as quick as what we could because, you know, it just dried down so fast this year for us in central Illinois. And so, you know, we were actually picking 117-day corn on Saturday that was planted in mid-May and it was testing 13 and 14%, so pretty crazy the way this stuff dried down.

Todd Gleason: Happy with your yields?

Matt Bennett: Yeah, I mean the yields were good, well off of any sort of a record, but yields were good. You know, overall I’ve heard a lot of horror stories and I think that, you know, where we had the most rain we had some tile which kind of helped us avoid a catastrophe, and the light ground once again this year performed quite well. So, you know, I think anybody who had a little bit of roll, you know, I mean light ground of course without any sort of drainage probably didn’t fare so well, but we have a pretty good mixture, you know, and some of that lighter ground performed pretty good this year.

Todd Gleason: What do you think of the marketplace today?

Matt Bennett: Well, you know, whenever you look, there’s no question that there’s a few things working against the bean market. You know, crush was not good, it came well under expectations, under 200. You know, you look at harvest activity, of course, and a big part of the corn belt has been a little more brisk I believe for soybeans than corn. I mean both corn and beans are below the five-year averages, but you’ve got to assume that you’re getting caught up on that. Overall, you know, it’s really tough to see the market rally when you’re in the thick of harvest, and so, you know, you’ve got to hope, whenever you look at these markets, that you can get some of these moving averages to hold. I mean it’s a little concerning when you look at November beans, you know, they closed below the 50-day moving average here today. With that being the case, you know, are you going to go take a look at the 100? You know, it’s certainly a possibility, and you know, that’d be a bit of a free fall, another 40 cents down to that 12 and a quarter level. So, you know, as far as beans are concerned, I would have liked to have seen them perform a little bit better here today. As far as corn is concerned, you know, we’ve just been kind of flirting with that 200-day, we closed below it here today, really the first close, I mean we’ve probed below it, but we closed below it today, and that’s really not what we want to see as far as December corn is concerned. So, definitely seeing a lot of hedge pressure, I’ve got to think funds continue to unwind some of their length in here. You know, dealing with the extra 3–400 million bushels of corn certainly hasn’t been anything that excites them to keep the length that they had, but whether they’ll completely unwind it I think, you know, that’s a bigger question.

Todd Gleason: When you look forward, do you see this market recovering into the month of November at some point?

Matt Bennett: Yeah, I think that from a cash standpoint, you’ll see basis offer you some opportunities, but as far as, you know, the market is concerned, I mean of course you’re going to be looking closely at once you have significantly more harvest data available, you know, actual yield results, you know, what does that November report look like? Obviously there’s a lot of questions from folks, including myself, you know, on what this final yield might end up looking like, and I could certainly see a scenario, you know, where the USDA actually trims corn a little bit. I’m not saying they’re going to go back to where they were, but I could see them trimming corn a little bit and then taking beans a little higher. So, you know, again, one thing I’ve talked to you about is that last year we just heard from so many growers that had record yields on corn. I mean it was a broken record type situation, and we’re hearing that more so on soybeans this year than we are corn. You know, a lot more talk of big time yields on beans in a wide variety of areas. We’re on corn, it just seems like there’s a lot of disappointed growers. So, you know, talking to all the growers that we do, it certainly seems like the corn yield seems a little rich right now, but I’m not so sure beans don’t go up.

Todd Gleason: Those producers that you have been talking to who’ve said they’ve had really good bean yields, are they selling across the scale, and is that part of the reason we’re seeing pressure in that marketplace too?

Matt Bennett: I’ve got to think there’s a fair amount of this selling across the scale for sure, Todd, just from some of the people that we’ve talked to. No question about it, that, you know, if you’re harvesting some of the best beans you’ve harvested before, you know, and you can still get 12.30, 12.40 for those beans, in some cases, you know, 12.50 and above. With if that’s the case, you know, it’s pretty tough to argue with that. And I do think some of those folks are coming back in and wanting some ownership on down the road, just in case, you know, South America would turn into more of a challenging weather situation. As of right now, it’s not. You know, actually they’re getting along pretty good as far as planting is concerned. They’ve the monsoon rains have really not showed up for them, but interestingly, some of the weather patterns, you know, the weather systems have come up from the south, which is fairly abnormal, but we know this is a very strange weather pattern we’re seeing with El Nino. So, they’ve actually been blessed with some rains that were not something that they were expecting, and so at this point the market’s looking at it saying, shoot, you know, maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all. But yeah, I do believe a lot of people are selling across the scale.

Todd Gleason: Hey, thank you much. I appreciate it.

Matt Bennett: Oh, absolutely. Thank you.

06:42 AgMarket Grows, Rebrands, and has a new Clearing Firm
Todd Gleason: That’s Matt Bennett. He is with AgMarket. Now joining us is Jim McCormick, one of Matt’s colleagues, actually one of the co-founders of AgMarket, to talk about some bigger news there that took place on the 10th day of this month. Hi Jim, thank you for taking time with me today. We’re not going to talk about the markets, you and I do that on occasion during our commodity week program, thank you for that as well. But I do want to talk about changes that have taken place. We say AgMarket now, as opposed to AgMarket.net, though the address is still the same, agmarket.net online, the website’s still there. The change is, I read through the press release, really appears to me that you and your colleagues have all gotten big enough that you are now a guaranteed introducing broker, moving through StoneX. So you’re just getting more for your clientele by having StoneX along with you, because they’re guaranteeing the financial back end of this. It’s a separate function from AgMarket altogether, so that they’ve got two places that they can be assured of that everything is working properly. I know there’s a lot more to this, but that seems to be one of the more important things that took place in this change. Can you tell me a bit more about it?

Jim McCormick: Well, yeah, I mean plain and simple, we’ve been around for seven years, we’ve grown quite a bit, and we’ve offered our clients, we believe, a very, a portfolio of ways to manage risk. And just kind of the next step of our evolution was to become our own GIB, which as you mentioned we are, we clear our trades through StoneX. But, you know, part of what we do here is the brokerage side here at AgMarket, you can go to agmarket.net. We also offer consulting for brokers who, for clients who are looking for a little bit more hands-on approach to helping develop marketing plans and executing those marketing plans. And then we also offer crop insurance as well as the LRP cattle insurance that we can help through our insurance division. So we’ve, we’ve kind of brought in a lot of divisions into one under essentially the AgMarket heading.

Todd Gleason: It seems to me that having both the crop insurance and the livestock risk protection insurance, both backed by the RMA, the US government, would be really important as risk management tools for your clients.

Jim McCormick: There’s, there’s no doubt about it, and this is part of why we took this step, because, if you look, I’ve been doing this out for almost 32, 33 years. You know, as this crop insurance has developed from just that very simple multi-peril to all these revenue insurances, it’s very, it’s one way of one part of the bucket of marketing grain, marketing livestock, as you take that insurance and kind of overlay it with a marketing plan, it can develop, help you develop kind of, we think, a well-rounded program in your marketing endeavors from just futures to HTAs, cash marketing, to using the insurance products that are offered to give you a more of a sustained way of managing your risk.

Todd Gleason: And you’re a multimedia company as well. You have a podcast, more than one actually, and those are really well-received across all of the grain states.

Jim McCormick: Yes we do, we are also working with Joe Vaclavik and his podcast that you can catch every day pretty much in all the, you know, all the standard places you could listen to, excuse me, as well as YouTube.

Todd Gleason: Alright. Hey, thanks much. We appreciate it. Anything else we should know about AgMarket?

Jim McCormick: No, best thing is if you have any questions about it folks, go to agmarket.net please.

Todd Gleason: Jim McCormick is the COO, the Chief Operating Officer at AgMarket. You’re listening to the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media on this Thursday afternoon. Find us online, listen to us on demand anytime you’d like at willag.org, that’s w-i-l-l-a-g-dot-o-r-g.

announce: You could say she’s like a prairie fire. Before the tractor, before the combine, before modern agriculture changed the world, there was a small patch of earth right here at the University of Illinois. You could say she’s like a prairie fire. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Morrow Plots. That’s the oldest continuous agricultural research fields in the Americas. For a century and a half, this soil has held the secrets of feeding a growing planet right in the heart of downstate Illinois. Discover the legacy buried in our own backyard on the next episode of Prairie Fire. Join us as we celebrate 150 years of the Morrow Plots. Watch Prairie Fire this Thursday, October the 15th at 7:30 p.m. Central on WILL TV or stream it on demand on YouTube and the PBS app. Prairie Fire tonight at 7:30 on WILL TV Channel 12.

12:12 Candy Makers Grapple with Cocoa, Sugar Headwinds
Todd Gleason: You know what I like? Candy. I do, I just like candy, particularly chocolate candy, and shoppers at this time of year for Halloween, well they’re going to notice something a little different about the candy aisle. Stephanie Hoff reports. She’s with the National Association of Farm Broadcasting.

Stephanie Hoff: Rising cocoa costs and concerns about sugar supplies are creating new challenges for candy manufacturers as they prepare for one of their biggest selling seasons. CoBank Senior Analyst of Food and Beverage Billy Roberts says cocoa prices remain well above where they were earlier this year.

Billy Roberts: We’ve seen those prices continue to kind of fluctuate up and down a little bit, but mostly in that general upward direction. As recently as, you know, March or April of this year, we had seen those cocoa prices kind of trend down to about the $3,000 per ton level on New York futures trading. Those prices started to increase a bit more once some concerns started to surface about this year’s harvest, and especially once concerns about the El Nino weather pattern that started to emerge really started to take hold in the industry and kind of influence what some of those futures traders were kind of expecting in terms of this year’s harvest and potentially even going into next year’s harvest. So those futures for cocoa are now upwards around, last time I checked, about between 56, 5700 per ton, so they’ve increased quite dramatically since March.

Stephanie Hoff: While cocoa has drawn much of the attention, Roberts says candy makers are also facing uncertainty in another key ingredient market.

Billy Roberts: Sugar crops are facing some uncertainty for fiscal year 26 and 27. Been some drought-related reductions in planted acreage of sugar beets. Some relatively lower sugar prices have impacted growers. A lot of high input costs which are impacting pretty much every facet of the ingredient supply chain. You know, and some uncertainty overall in the sugar space about sugar demand from consumers. Because, you know, a lot of concern there stems from consumers continuing embrace of GLP–1s. But regardless, it’s still impacting the amount of sugar that’s actually available on the market.

Stephanie Hoff: It’s not just sugar beets seeing headwinds. Sugar cane growers in the southeastern US are facing pest pressure, including from a new pest called pasture mealybug. With costs climbing across multiple ingredients, manufacturers are looking for ways to control expenses while still delivering what the shoppers want.

Billy Roberts: So we’ve seen some more inclusions, things like, you know, whether it’s little pretzel bites or little other types of elements added to the product wafers, what have you, that can really kind of augment that piece of candy. Give it that same, you know, degree of desirability and flavor, but also not increase the cost quite as much as completely reformulating the product and potentially risking consumers. But also not increasing the cost that consumers would ultimately have to pay, and trying to keep those costs down kind of where they can.

Stephanie Hoff: Those changes are also designed to help reduce the sticker shock consumers have experienced in recent years.

Billy Roberts: What we’re seeing with some of these inclusions and some of the reformulations and smaller package sizes, are where chocolate brands are seeking to offset some of those price shocks, those sticker shocks, that consumers have experienced over the past three or four seasons of Halloween and Christmas, where they suddenly go to the shelf and they may not have picked up a bag of candy in six months, seven months, maybe even as much as a year, and all of a sudden they’re looking at a price that’s a lot more than what they were expecting. You know, candy prices are up, I believe I read about 70% over the past five years.

Stephanie Hoff: CoBank Food and Beverage Analyst Billy Roberts along with us. He says chocolate demand around major candy holidays like Halloween and Christmas remains strong. On the supply side, manufacturers continue to balance higher ingredient costs with consumers’ expectations for value and quality. I’m Stephanie Hoff reporting.

Todd Gleason: And I’m Todd Gleason, you’re listening to the Closing Market Report on this Thursday afternoon. Our theme music is written, performed, produced, and courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason.

16:32 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention to the growing regions across the planet and how climate is impacting each of them. Mike Tannura is here, he’s with Tstorm Weather, serves as the president and CEO there in Naperville, Illinois, online at tstorm.net. Hello Mike, thanks for being with us.

Mike Tannura: Hey Todd, thanks a lot for having me here.

Todd Gleason: Let’s start in the southwest, as far south as Texas if you want, to the west, but I’m really concerned about Oklahoma, Kansas, those areas, some of the southwest where they really do put a hard red winter wheat crop in the ground at this time of the year. There has been quite a bit of rainfall so far, what if any concerns does that give you, or does it give you hope?

Mike Tannura: Well, I think overall it gives you hope because if you have a lot of rainfall at this time of the year and it continues into the winter, you set yourself up for pretty fantastic crops. So at this point in time, the overall picture is that all the rains that we’ve seen over the last several weeks and the rains that we have coming up one to two weeks from now are more than likely going to be a very good thing for that crop. But in the near term, the potential problem is that it will make it a little bit difficult to plant. If you look at Oklahoma and Kansas, their wheat planting is a little bit behind schedule. And parts of Oklahoma were hammered by heavy rain over the last two days. Some parts of that state had more than six inches. And that wasn’t in the non-agricultural areas of the east, that was in the key western wheat areas. And when you put it all together, the basic story is that this is not good from a planting standpoint, but wheat is not like corn and soybeans. You can plant it late and still have a really fantastic crop, as long as you don’t have an early start to winter or something like that. Is now in progress, it makes a cold start very unlikely across the central United States, and that does make the rains that we’re seeing now a probable thing to continue, and in fact that’s probably what’s driving all the rain that we’re seeing.

Todd Gleason: Speaking of the rain that we’re seeing, it stretches from Lubbock, Texas all the way through, I don’t know, St. Louis or thereabouts to come across a good portion of Illinois, up into other areas as well. Rapid City and South Dakota, Fargo is probably getting a little rain, Des Moines will get some rain I suppose across the corn belt. That’ll slow things down. I think farmers actually are not terribly worried, maybe a little different in Iowa about that, they kind of more or less want the break. Will they be able to get back in the field very quickly?

Mike Tannura: Well, they should be able to. Once they get beyond the next 24 hours, there’s very little rain in the near term. It’ll be pretty dry from Friday all the way into late next week. So we should see at least six to eight days of dry weather in the corn belt, and that of course will start to allow producers to get back into the fields later next week. And even, Todd, we need to kind of keep in mind that even though we saw all that heavy rain out in the plains over the last one to two days, that’s not going to be the story in the corn belt. Yes, it is going to rain today, but totals will be on the much lighter side, maybe between a quarter of an inch and three-quarters of an inch, and that’s not enough to cause a major problem. So things should be looking up in the corn belt. The next thing we’ll have to watch is that system that comes in about a week from now. There are hints that it could bring some decent rains to the western corn belt, but the eastern corn belt is going to be more influenced by a surface level high. And that should keep things probably a little bit drier. So overall, doesn’t really look too concerning for harvesting.

Todd Gleason: Turn your attention to South America, begin in Brazil and then work your way through Argentina.

Mike Tannura: Well, the story in Brazil is very easy. They’ve been getting a ton of rain over the last month and they’re going to continue to get a lot of rain. The series of systems are lining up across the country and those are going to continue right on into the end of the month. And even though it is a little bit unusual, it’s not all that unusual when you consider that we’re in a strong El Nino. Typically they have very wet closes to the year across the southern half of the corn and soybean belt, and that’s certainly what we’re seeing now. The wildcard kind of develops once you get further to the north. Sometimes when you have a strong El Nino it’s also wet, like we saw in 1982 into 1983 and also from 1997 into 98. But in other strong El Ninos, they end up being a little bit drier. That’s what happened in 2015 and 16, and then from 2023 into 24. The scenario right now certainly looks much more like what we had in 1982 and back in 1997 because they’ve been getting a lot of rains in the central and north and there’s more ahead over the next couple of weeks. So typically, Todd, once you start your El Nino like this it typically stays like that at least through December. So once you get into January things could go one way or the other, but for now it’s just going to stay wet and that looks like it’ll be the case here all the way through the end of the month.

Todd Gleason: Turn your attention then further to the south, Paraguay, Argentina, Sao Paulo I suppose in Brazil, but mostly I’m concerned about what those growing regions look like in the southern part of the continent.

Mike Tannura: Well, when you’re in Paraguay, you’re pretty close to Brazil and you’re getting hammered by all those rains too. So the same setup that applies to southern Brazil also applies to Paraguay, where they’re going to have a very wet first half of their growing season, that certainly seems to be the case and that’s where we are today. In Argentina you can kind of go either way with these setups, but they’ve had some great rains over the last couple of weeks, and that’s really improved the wheat prospects we would have to imagine. It might have slowed down corn and sunflower planting a little bit, but overall it improved soil moisture and it sets the stage up very nicely for planting as we move into the end of the month, and then certainly in November when we’ll be more into the soybean planting area. But for now, Todd, there are just going to be more rain events out there, maybe not as widespread and with the frequency that we’re seeing in Brazil, but there’s real no reason to think that there’s any type of dryness problem coming up in Argentina either.

Todd Gleason: Hey, thank you much. I appreciate it.

Mike Tannura: Sounds great, Todd. Talk to you next week.

Todd Gleason: Indeed we will. That’s Mike Tannura. He is with Tstorm Weather at tstorm.net online. Joined us on this Thursday 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. That’s w-i-l-l-a-g-dot-o-r-g. I’m extensions Todd Gleason.