cmr261105

In the November 5, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report, host Todd Gleason covers commodity markets, yield forecasts, weed science, and agricultural weather. Kaden Sweeney of AgMarket discusses local harvest yields in east-central Illinois and anticipates a quiet November USDA crop production report, noting that soybean prices will heavily depend on Brazilian weather developments. Mike Castle from StoneX highlights their latest customer yield survey, which projects national corn and soybean yields higher than previous estimates due to surprisingly strong performance across the northern plains. University of Illinois weed scientist Aaron Hager shares details about a new regional survey assessing farmer awareness and readiness to adopt precision weed control technologies, such as optical sprayers. Finally, Mike Tannura of T-Storm Weather explains how an exceptionally strong El Niño is driving mild U.S. winter weather—likely benefiting the winter wheat crop—while currently bringing heavy spring rains to South America that are supporting their soybean crop development.

01:33 Ag Markets with Kaden Sweeney, AgMarket
08:01 StoneX November Crop Production Survey Revisions
12:09 Grower Survey on Precision Weed Control Technologies
17:26 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, tStorm.net

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Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the fifth day of November, 2026. I’m Extension’s Todd Gleason. Coming up, we’ll talk about the commodity markets with Kaden Sweeney from AgMarket. Matt Bennett is out of the office this afternoon. We’ll turn our attention to the StoneX numbers and how they were detailed, as it’s related to the changes you’ll be surprised by in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota, by Mike Castle. He is Arlan Suderman’s replacement there, and we’ve talked with him before. He left us a nice voicemail about that. And then we’ll turn our attention to the weather forecast with Mike Tannura. T-Storm Weather, that’s tstorm.net online. Oh, and along the way, Aaron Hager will be here, too, from the University of Illinois. He’s a weed scientist. There’s a brand new weed science technology survey that we would like you to take. You can do that at go.illinois.edu/weedcontrol. I’ll give you that address again later in the program. Stay with us for this Thursday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media.

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

announce: In Chicago, corn futures finished about three to four lower. Soybeans were down 14 cents. Soft red wheat finished narrowly mixed for the day, and the hard red winter wheat was up around 3 cents on this Thursday afternoon.

Ag Market Update
Todd Gleason: We’re now joined by Kaden Sweeney. He is with AgMarket here this afternoon to talk about the commodity markets. Hi, Kaden. Thanks for being with us, your first time with us. I must point out at the beginning that you are a University of Illinois College of ACES grad. Thank you for taking time with me today. Can you tell me about your background a little bit?

Kaden Sweeney: Yeah, thank you for having me, man. It’s a pleasure, and a proud Illini as well, like you said. I’m a seventh-generation corn and soybean farmer, actually headquartered out of Charleston, just about an hour south of campus there in east-central Illinois. I just got wrapped up with harvest a couple of weeks ago and am kind of getting back in the saddle here. Like you said, I’m a broker with AgMarket as well, and have been for about six years now.

Todd Gleason: Tell me about harvest and what the crops were like for you.

Kaden Sweeney: Yeah, we are south of Route 16 just barely, and so we have a little bit more roll than you guys do, and so we had plenty of water, but less to the extent of my friends in Champaign and Douglas counties. And also got rid of it a little bit better. So our corn yields are about five bushels lower than last year. I have certainly heard numbers where that number is more like 20 to 30 lower, so we’re thankful for that. Soybeans are actually better than last year. We just had some pretty good August rains to finish them out, about five bushels better than last year. So, all in all, a good crop. Not sure I would call it a great crop, but definitely a good one, especially for how it looked in the middle of June when we were getting just hammered with rain.

Todd Gleason: Next week, the United States Department of Agriculture will update the crop production numbers, the last one for the fall before they give the final in January. WASDE, our World Ag Supply and Demand Estimates, will be released as well. What is AgMarket thinking about that set of numbers and the changes that could come along with it?

Kaden Sweeney: Yeah, we actually kept our corn estimate number the same as the October estimate from the USDA at 181.2. We did get kind of the average of the analyst estimates out this morning. Looks like the trade’s looking at a 180.3-ish, which would be about a bushel drop. I believe that would be warmly welcomed by the marketplace and by everybody who’s been upset over the course of the last month, but it is certainly going to be interesting. I’m probably more of the opinion that in this November report, it’s fairly quiet. A bushel change is not to me a big market mover. But for everybody clamoring that national yield is probably more 177 or 178, I’m not sure I disagree; I just don’t think we see it in this November report. I think that waits and comes until January.

Todd Gleason: What do you think about the action in both the corn and the soybeans over the last couple of weeks?

Kaden Sweeney: Yeah, I was having some conversations with growers, even during harvest a month or two ago, that a lot of the soybean market had some premium built in based on the El Nino fears in Brazil, right? And kind of making comments that if this El Nino doesn’t really come to fruition, beans are overpriced and probably by quite a bit. We certainly have seen a lot of that premium erode here over the last month, but especially in the last two weeks. I’m speaking a bit hypocritically, I definitely still have some beans in the bin that aren’t priced, and I’m kind of hanging on to them to see what happens in Brazil, but I think it was kind of easy to say now in hindsight. The bean market sure seemed to be overpriced, especially when corn was selling off like it was post-October WASDE and beans were hanging in there. So the corn market action to me was not especially surprising after that October report. I would really like to see us start to put our foot in the ground and get up off the mat here as we’re reaching some major lows that we’ve made in the last calendar year, but yeah, it’s certainly been a bloodbath, no doubt about it.

Todd Gleason: I’m interested to know why it is you thought that premium was related to El Nino and Brazil as opposed to crude oil and the war in Iran and diesel fuel, the war in Ukraine.

Kaden Sweeney: Yeah, that’s definitely a good point too, and certainly one I can’t or won’t argue against. I more come at it from the form of, and yield is certainly not the only matter of the balance sheet, right? But we’re posting USDA WASDE yields very similar to last year’s record, and we’re trading two to two and a half bushels above that. I thought, man, 13 dollars just seems rich, right? And I think you make a great point that a lot of that had to do with the price of oil and all the such. I just also take it in the fact that, and maybe I’m biased in the conversations I’m having with growers, but that was the sentiment that I got from them was like, “Well, I know beans are good right now, but ahead of this potentially important growing season in Brazil, I’m not real interested in getting out of a bunch of them.” So, that remains to be seen. Everybody knows what a superpower Brazil is at this point in time in terms of bean production and exports; any blip there is going to matter a ton. I think the market was front-running that somewhat. But it also makes sense to your point, the way this thing has sold off, that we certainly have had plenty of news about crude oil and less news about Brazil in the time that the beans have been selling off here.

Todd Gleason: Where do you think they’re headed at this time?

Kaden Sweeney: I was just looking at that myself. I don’t know that… we just crossed today the 200-day moving average, which I’m not a huge technical guy, but that usually matters to the funds, right? And we cleared that pretty easily and quickly today. I’m going back looking at summertime lows of 11.40, and this is off of the January contract since November is in delivery. 11.40 to me is the next stopping point, and if that doesn’t hold, we’re going back to the January lows, which would be around the 10.90 area. So, I don’t know that I would say we’re on a one-way ticket to there, but if we continue to see these major levels breaking down, I don’t think that’s at all out of the realm of possibility. I think you can take another dollar out of this thing pretty quickly if Brazil stays on track and we keep having trouble with the Middle East.

Todd Gleason: Thank you much, Kaden. I appreciate it.

Kaden Sweeney: Hey, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Todd Gleason: That’s Kaden Sweeney. He is with AgMarket, also a graduate from the University of Illinois. By the way, a bronze tablet recipient, which means at the U of I, he is in the top 3% of his class.

StoneX Yield Survey
Todd Gleason: You’re listening to the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media. Our theme music is written, performed, produced, and courtesy of Logan County, Illinois farmer Tim Gleason. Now up next, we’ll update corn and soybean yield and production figures for the nation. As you probably have already heard, the trade estimates are out. The average trade guess for the corn yield is 180.3 bushels to the acre. The trade puts the national soybean yield at 53 and a half. StoneX has the highest yield numbers in that mix for both crops. I asked Mike Castle from StoneX to explain their numbers. He sent me this voicemail.

Mike Castle: Hey Todd, Mike Castle here, going to go over the StoneX yield survey numbers real quick. Starting with the corn side of things, our November customer yield survey came in at 183.1 bushels per acre for the national average. That’s up one bushel an acre from our October estimate. For context, USDA was at 181.2 in October, so that’s 1.9 above. Soybean side of things, up 0.9 bushels per acre from the October estimate to 55.0 bushels per acre at the national level. Overall, in general, what drove the change was effectively just better-than-expected yield results. Just looking at where the upward revisions came from, most of this was centered in the northern US. On the corn side of things, we saw a 7-bushel an acre uptick in Minnesota, an 8-bushel an acre uptick in Nebraska and Wisconsin. Overall, most of our clients specifically on those northern plains or even northern Iowa, southern Minnesota, reported fantastic yields blowing past expectations. I was very surprised to hear that from our brokers here in the last few weeks, particularly those folks in the northern plains, in that Red River Valley. Yields came in way better than expected despite really, really poor growing conditions for part of the year. Really dry stretch. I would have thought North Dakota would be one of the less positive states overall. We saw a modest revision with them on the soybean side of things. South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska really drove the soybean improvement. Ohio was up another two as well. Overall, we’ve heard more impressive results on soybeans specifically. Of note, a couple of places saw decreases; for example, on the corn and soybean side of things, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois revised down. Overall, a lot of your areas that were kind of expected to be some of the poorest held up better than expected in general. Again, specifically on that soybean side of things. Corn, I don’t think is as much of a surprise. Obviously, you saw USDA move their yield estimate higher in October, up past 181. But as we got deeper into harvest and as we’re now through a lot more of that soybean harvest, I do think you’ve seen significantly outperformed expectations for a lot of the country. Obviously, that wet stretch there in the tail end of summer for the areas that flooded out was certainly a detriment. All of the areas surrounding that caught that moisture that wasn’t excessive has clearly proven to be quite a benefit to yield. So, overall, that is what kind of drove the change there, and we’ll see how we come in next week.

Todd Gleason: Again, that was Mike Castle from StoneX exploring the company’s November customer yield survey update, reporting national average yield increases for both corn at 183.1 bushels to the acre and soybeans at 55. As Mike reported, the upward revisions were primarily driven by better-than-expected yields across the northern United States, specifically in the northern plains, northern Iowa, and southern Minnesota, despite poor early-season growing conditions. While states like Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois experienced downward revisions, USDA will release its crop production and WASDE reports next Tuesday at 11:00 AM Central.

Weed Control Technologies
Todd Gleason: If you happen to be on the Crop Central email list, that’s the old Weed Sciences bulletin from the University of Illinois, that bulletin’s not been in place for a long time, but if you search out Crop Central at illinois.edu, you should come up with the Crop Sciences site. All those articles that are posted to it are on our website, by the way, at willag.org. That brand new email came with this heading: Grower Survey on Precision and New Weed Control Technologies from Aaron Hager, weed scientist here on campus. In it, he was describing how the weed scientists at the University of Nebraska have launched a regional survey to assess how farmers view precision weed management technologies. I called Aaron to ask him more about the survey.

Aaron Hager: Actually, our colleagues at the University of Nebraska have initiated a research project to try to determine farmer and applicator awareness and/or utility of various precision weed management technologies. For example, some of the optical recognition spray systems. Nobody’s really done this before. We tend to hear different scenarios depending on the person, the individual, the location. It would seem that some have readily adopted things like these optical sprayers, and others have tried them but seem to be a little bit reluctant to continue to use them. And so the survey will try to assess how aware people are of these types of technologies. It’ll also ask questions around your weed management program. What types of materials are you using? Are you strictly using herbicides? Do you also include mechanical weed control or other types of weed control technologies?

Todd Gleason: What are you hoping that you find out from the survey?

Aaron Hager: I think it really would shed light on some of the direction that farmers and applicators are willing to go as they continue to face increasing challenges, especially around herbicide resistance. It’s not a problem that’s necessarily going to get any easier to solve, but some of the new technologies, and it’s not just about the optical spray systems, some people may be considering using things like electrocution to try to reduce late-season weed seed production, these kind of things. We hearken back to years ago, we started talking about the issues around resistance, and it was not well accepted. But currently, with the profiles that we have with resistance around not only Illinois but across the Midwest, it’s something that farmers and retail applicators simply cannot ignore anymore.

Todd Gleason: On a related note, Aaron, to the survey itself, is there anything in the pipeline that might require, for instance, an optical sprayer, something that a broadcast sprayer wouldn’t be able to use, that producers might be able to see in the near future?

Aaron Hager: That’s a really interesting question, Todd. I kind of look at these optical sprayers as really the first step. Can we recognize weeds and spray only the things that the system recognizes as a weed, for example? But I think over time, as optics improve, as technology improves, we’ll probably see these types of systems be able to do things that you and I probably can’t even imagine right now. There may come a time where farmers or applicators are able to reference every seed that’s dropped in a cornfield, for example. And if you know where these plants are and you have a system at some point in the future that can recognize individual plants, maybe you can actually do individual feeding of plants or individual applications of other pest control technologies. I think the future of the technology really hasn’t got many limits to it.

Todd Gleason: And then back to the survey, this is just about how quickly producers might be willing to adopt new technologies.

Aaron Hager: I think it’s really trying to assess where are we in terms of adoption, where are we in terms of awareness. And again, some other questions related to what other tools and technologies are farmers and applicators currently using or what types of things would they like to know more about in the future? Where can extension weed scientists try to fill these knowledge gaps where they do exist?

Todd Gleason: Aaron Hager is a weed scientist from the University of Illinois. He was discussing a brand new regional survey being conducted by the weed scientists at the University of Nebraska. The survey aims to capture where farmers stand on these barriers and what economic factors influence their willingness to adopt new technologies. You may take the survey and share your views at go.illinois.edu/weedcontrol. Again, that’s go.illinois.edu/weedcontrol.

El Nino & South American Crop
Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention now to the growing regions across the planet. We’re joined by Mike Tannura. He’s the CEO and president of T-Storm Weather at tstorm.net online, out of Naperville, Illinois. Hi, Mike, thanks for being with us. I’d like to have a conversation today about El Nino. What can you tell us about this weather phenomenon?

Mike Tannura: Well, it’s driving weather across the United States and South America, and this is affecting the key crops that we think about here in the US. And it’s going to remain a driving force for at least several more months, and in the US, arguably all the way through the spring. The thing that we’re watching in the US, Todd, is that typically, once you start getting into this time of the year, and especially next month, you usually have a really mild winter. And we’re certainly seeing very mild weather now. This El Nino is a little bit different than the ones that we’ve dealt with in the past because it’s so much stronger. This El Nino is just way stronger than what we saw back in 2015 and ’16, or from 1997 into ’98, or the more classic El Nino of 1982 into ’83. So this one is just on a whole different level. And it’s arguable that that’s the reason that we’re seeing all this warm weather now. We know that we usually have a mild winter, we know this has been one of the mildest falls on record across the central US, and is very likely being driven by that. As we go forward through the winter and into the spring, eventually we’ll come out of this, and we’ll very likely have had a very mild winter, and people will start thinking about what does this mean for the spring. Well, usually for the key areas of the crop for US wheat, which is in the Plains, that area is usually pretty wet in the winter, and it’s also pretty wet in the spring, and we’ve had a lot of bumper crops with this type of setup. So, for the US wheat crop, more than likely, you’re going to have a pretty big crop coming up. We’ve seen a lot of rain lately; the crop does like that at this time of the year, but still, the key weather is months out. But just historically, Todd, when you have an El Nino of this strength, you typically get a really nice big US wheat crop. And that’s where all directions are still pointed right now.

Todd Gleason: Does it impact other areas in the northern hemisphere in the same way for the winter wheat crops?

Mike Tannura: Well, just that the central US is usually unusually warm, and that extends or becomes more notable as you move north. So, even though as you move north, it always gets colder, you need to keep that in mind. I mean, a warm day in North Dakota in January might have a high of around 45 degrees, so it’s not like it’s going to be 75 or 80 or something like that. But, they’ll be way above normal in North Dakota, and that extends through the Canada prairies as well. So that’s kind of the area that usually ends up being way warmer than normal, but everybody ends up being warmer than normal too, but that’s just kind of where the core of it is in the wintertime. But overall, wheat generally isn’t doing a whole lot in the middle of the winter, but usually, you’re getting some nice rains, especially further to the south in the central and southern Plains. And that’s kind of the area where we think it’ll end up being wet this winter, and if not, this spring. At some point, they’ll probably get some pretty good rains, and we’ve already seen that this fall. So, that’s kind of the main effect on US weather from a strong El Nino.

Todd Gleason: Of course, we’ve been following closely the development of the South American crop. What impacts does El Nino have in Argentina and Brazil?

Mike Tannura: Well, their effects are more direct, and they’re also a lot sooner. Their main effects are in the spring, which is happening right now, and then lasts through their summer, which is coming up over the next few months. They usually get a lot of rain, especially in southern Brazil and into Argentina. If you look historically at their corn and soybean crops, usually they’ve been pretty good. Not always, but they usually end up being okay from a lot of water, especially over the first half of the growing season. They’ve seen a lot of rain over the last couple of months; even yesterday, parts of southern Brazil had one, two, three, four inches of rain again. This is something that’s been repeatedly happening all the way since September. And there’s more of this coming up, not only tomorrow but about a week from now too. So, certainly, their weather is being completely driven by the strong El Nino with all the rains. Once you get into next year, we’re talking about January and into February, that’s where things start to break up a little bit, especially in Brazil. By that point in time, soybeans are kind of past their key period of development. So, if you get a lot of water leading into January, even if you have bad weather in January, you still probably would have an okay soybean crop as kind of your bottom end. But once you get beyond that, then things get a little more variable. And sometimes we have seen some pretty big droughts once you get into April and May in that key center-west region, which is where all of their safrinha corn is produced later on next year. So that’ll be probably the next thing to watch, assuming everything keeps on working out similarly until then.

Todd Gleason: Great information. Thank you much, Mike.

Mike Tannura: Well, thanks for having me here, Todd.

Todd Gleason: You’re welcome. That’s Mike Tannura. He is with T-Storm Weather at tstorm.net online out of Naperville, Illinois. Don’t forget that we’ll record Commodity Week later today. It’ll be up on our website by about 6:00 tonight at willag.org. We’ll carry it on our home station in its entirety tomorrow, and many of these stations will carry it over the weekend. I’m Extension’s Todd Gleason.