8/23/2021

After some big down days to finish last week, corn and soybeans found some stability on Monday.  Corn closed slightly lower but was able to trade higher for a portion of the day, garnering support from a sharply weaker dollar and Brazil corn being a premium.  Good weekend rains in the north west region of the grain belt and rumors of the EPA recommending a lower bio-fuel mandate stemmed any real momentum in corn on the day.  Soybeans improved a couple pennies today on some spillover support from crude and soybean oil.  US soybeans are currently around 50 cents/bushel cheaper than Brazil.  August sales have totaled over 90 million bushels so far and today was the first day in the past 12 that we did not see a daily export sale to China flashed.  The USDA did confirm a sale this morning, though, of 458,600 tonnes (18 million bushels) of corn to Mexico for the 2021/22 marketing year.  Weekly export inspections were right in line with trade range estimates with 725k tonnes of corn and 214k tonnes of soybeans inspected.  Wheat outperformed expectations with 658k tonnes inspected for export vs the top estimate of 575k tonnes.  This past weekend's rain totaled 1.75" at the elevator in Murdock.