Grain Comments: 08.13.25

Good morning. Follow through buying is being in the soybean market to start mid-week trade, while the feed grain markets are quietly mixed around unchanged. Momentum seems to be shifting a bit for the bean market from a chart standpoint, with both old and new crop futures having made new highs again for the week already this morning and both markets also trading above the downtrend line from the June high for really the first time. The question, with new crop demand remaining abysmally bad, now becomes how far can a rally go just before harvest gets started; we see resistance in the 10.60-10.70 ballpark on November beans and assume some sort of demand news will be needed to be push prices much further than that. Corn futures to start Wednesday morning are trading 1-2 cents higher, soybean futures are trading 10-12 cents higher, and the Chicago wheat market is trading around a penny higher. Products are higher, soybean meal is up around $1/ton and soybean oil is up 60 points. Outside markets are mixed, crude oil futures are down 30-40 cents/bbl, the Dow Jones index is up 130 points, and the US$ index is down around 40 points; the S&P500 is up 10 points and the NASDAQ is up 60 points.

Today’s Reports: EIA Weekly Ethanol Production/Energy Stocks

• CME Group deliveries for Wednesday include 118 contracts of soybean meal and 3 contracts of soybean oil.

• This morning’s weekly ethanol production report for the week ending August 8th is expected to show average daily production in the week between 1.071-1.076 mil bbls, while stocks are seen between 23.20-23.656 mil bbls.

• Production adjustments were the main story in yesterday’s WASDE update, with corn production being adjusted higher by more than a billion bushels from last month and soybean production being adjusted lower by nearly 50 mil bu. At the state level, USDA currently sees 8 states as setting new all-time record corn yields and sees 10 states either setting or tying their all-time record soybean yields. To view our updated supply/demand tables, please click here.

• Cash sources told Reuters on Tuesday that Chinese buyers had finished their soybean purchases for September and were about half covered for October, with around 4 million tons left to buy. Last year during the same two month period, Chinese buyers purchased upwards of 7 MMTs from the US, while this year those purchases stand at zero. China typically takes the bulk of their US bean purchases between September and January, before new supplies from South America are available.

• Private Black Sea ag consultancy SovEcon again raised their forecast of Russia’s 2025/26 wheat production, taking it from 83.6 MMTs in July to now 85.2 MMTs this month. The group cited new planted area data that showed wheat area at 26.9 million acres compared to the 26.6 mil the group was using previously.

• Export data from the European Commission released yesterday showed EU wheat exports in the current marketing year at roughly 1.43 MMTs as of August 10th, compared to 3.28 MMTs over a similar period last year. Data also showed EU corn imports at just 986k tons in the season, which is down nearly 70% from last year. Of note, this dataset continues to be incomplete due to ongoing technical issues.

• The CME’s FedWatch tool this morning is showing a better than 96% chance that the Fed lowers interest rates in their September policy meeting following better than expected inflation data on Tuesday. The numbers showed annual inflation at 2.7%, which was unchanged from last month and better than economists had predicted; core inflation, though, fell above expectations at 3.1%, which was the highest reading since February.

• Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent mentioned that the Fed could possibly cut rates by as much as 50 basis points at their September meeting, in order to, as he put it, “make up for the delay”. Bessent was also hopeful new Trump appointee Stephen Miran could be confirmed to the Fed board before the September meeting.

• Still not a lot new as far as short term weather is concerned the rest of this week, as sporadic thunderstorm activity will continue to impact the northern half of the corn Belt over the next few days and into the weekend and next week. Further out, week two maps are trending wetter in the central Plains, but still offer mostly dry conditions to the Midwest. The EU AI’s outlook in the period is significantly wetter, but has been most of summer and has not been very accurate.