OnlyFarms.Gov, White House Ag Celebration, RVOs, The Funds

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Welcome back! Let’s break down the biggest ag market movers right now 🌽📉

🌱 Biofuel Mandates Jump

EPA sets record 25.82B gallons
70% of waived volumes reassigned
Foreign feedstocks penalized after 2028
Supportive long-term, not bullish today

🏛️ Trump’s Farmer Push

Pushing additional aid 💰
New SBA loan guarantees
Targeting DEF rollback + lower equipment costs
Trade talk strong… but soybean exports lag

📊 Funds Get Active

Corn: +49k contracts (big long build)
Beans: slight selling
Wheat: shorts trimmed significantly

🌧️ Weather Watch

Heavy Corn Belt rains incoming
Could slow early planting progress
HRW wheat may miss key moisture

🌽➡️🌱 Acreage Shift Brewing

Corn acres seen down ~4–5%
Soybeans up ~5%
Fertilizer costs exploding (urea +40%)
War impact not fully in USDA data yet

🚢 Export Check

Flash sale: 105k mt soybeans
Total sales still down ~18% YoY

👉 Bottom line: supportive policy + tighter inputs, but market already priced it in.

Transcript

RVO News

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Morning guys, it's Monday, March 30th, 5 39 a.m. Central Time. We're getting started late because I had technical difficulties. So we apologize. Uh May Corn Futures up one at 463. May soybeans up eight and three quarters at 1168. May Chicago wheat up one at 606. May Kansas City wheat down two and three quarters at 6.30. Uh big RVO news on Friday. Why don't we start there?

SPEAKER_01 0:29

So the Trump administration announced new biofuel blending quotas on Friday, requiring U.S. refiners to blend a record 25.82 billion gallons of biofuels this year. The policy also mandates that large refiners account for 70% of waived volumes from 2023 through 2025. Beginning in 2028, foreign fuels and feedstocks will receive only half the rinse credits granted to U.S. made products. According to Trump, the new standards are expected to generate more than$10 billion for rural economies and create roughly 100,000 jobs. Some refiners, however, caution that the higher blending requirements could further increase diesel and gasoline prices by raising regulatory costs.

White House Event, OnlyFarms

SPEAKER_00 1:11

There are biofuel experts out there who could explain all of these numbers to you in great detail. I'm not one of those experts. What I will tell you is this this news was very clearly discounted in the marketplace. Soybeans closed lower on Friday. Soybean oil closed lower on Friday. There was not any big excitement when the numbers came out because we've been expecting the numbers for months. We kind of knew the numbers and have known them for weeks because there was some kind of leak that went on, apparently. So this big picture, this is very positive. It's very supportive. We are going to be using more soybean oil for um renewable diesel and that sort of thing. But over the near term, it's not anything that's going to get the market overly excited. It is a positive, though, because the trend, in all likelihood, given what's going on in Brazil, what's going on in China, we're probably going to export less soybeans. We need to use more domestically. We are using more domestically, and that trend is very likely to continue.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

During the celebration of agriculture at the White House on Friday, President Trump unveiled numerous measures aimed at supporting U.S. farmers, such as advocating for additional farmer aid. He also announced that the small business administration will introduce new loan guarantees for farmers to help address rising input costs. Trump said he is working to roll back deaf requirements and reduce farm equipment costs. He further highlighted efforts to expand agricultural trade, particularly for soybeans, despite stating that you despite stating that U.S. soybeans are being shipped to China in record amounts, exports for the current marketing year are at a 19-year low.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Mackenzie, just for the record, you were not actually at the White House, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Negative. No, I was not.

The Funds

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Some people were like happy that you were there, then other people were upset because I said you were there. I was joking, but you were not there. Um okay, guys. So now you can go to go to onlyfarms.gov and you can learn about all of the great things that the Trump administration has done for you. Uh here is a highlight. So they had this fact sheet on onlyfarms.gov about uh just kind of what's going on. They summarized it in these ex posts. They talked about historic tax relief for family farms as part of the uh one big beautiful tax bill. And that's that's true. There was some tax relief. There was also a tremendous increase to the crop insurance safety net, which uh we've talked about, but it's not anything new. Um they talked about expanding markets for American ag, which, as McKenzie kind of mentioned, is suspect at best. Our soybean export program has suffered because of the tariffs. Um, everything else is probably acting as if it would have normally. You know, corn exports have been fantastic. I don't know that that's necessarily because of anything that the president or the White House has done. Uh, when they talked about uh cutting red tape, lowering cost, they're talking about right to repair. They're also talking about deaf. And no, you you still have to use deaf, but they're trying to get rid of some of the issues, trying to fix deaf system failures, reduced or delayed um D-rate or limp mode penalties. I don't know, some stuff that I don't really understand. But no, you're still gonna have to use deaf the way that it looks. Boosting farm income through energy. Yeah, they did an E15 waiver, as has every president the last nine or 10 years. Um, the new biofuel stuff is positive. We talked about that. We kind of knew it was coming. Uh Trump said in his in his little speech, he said, I gave you 12 billion dollars. Did Biden do that? Yeah, Biden did do that. Um, they had FBA, or no, FBA was Trump, ECAP was was Biden, but both presidents gave away a lot of money to farmers. So I don't know. I thought the whole thing kind of fell flat for me personally. Like I didn't just I didn't really learn very much. Um, it was cool that they did a celebration and had a bunch of farmers, but um I don't know that we really learned anything new.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

The CFTC released its weekly commitment of traders report on Friday for the weekending Tuesday, March 24th. Large money managers were net buyers of 49,000 corn contracts. The net long position of 280,000 corn contracts is the largest since February 2025. The funds were net sellers of 4,000 soybean contracts. And lastly, the funds were net buyers of 11,000 SRW wheat contracts on the week. The net short position of 1,000 SRW wheat contracts is the smallest since June 2022.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

To me, this is much more interesting than anything we talked about in the first two stories, and it should be more interesting to you than anything we talked about in the first two stories. Um, in corn, the funds were estimated to be net long 290,000 contracts at Friday's close. It's not an extreme, but you're getting close. Uh, very rarely do you see the funds net long more than 300,000 contracts of corn. Uh premium subs, you guys have full versions of the fund tractor charts in your email this morning. In soybeans, funds estimated to be net long 200,000 contracts at uh Friday's close. That's an aggressive net long. And the funds are now estimated to be net long about 10,000 contracts of SRW wheat. So you've got some aggressive fund buying, speculative buying in the grain space for a couple of different reasons. Um, you've got this whole Iran situation and fertilizer situation. Fertilizer's gotten expensive. The trade believes that perhaps corn acreage is going to drop, that perhaps we're going to see global production of a lot of things reduced. Um, and then you've got the whole inflation trade aspect. Hey, we're looking for some drastically higher inflation rates because of the price of gasoline in particular and other items related to Iran. And when there's an inflation event, the funds tend to buy and own grains, and that's what we're seeing here. So across corn soybeans and SRW wheat, the funds are net long 470,000 contracts. The record uh for that particular data set was 626,000 contracts in 2012, and they could easily get there if they decided that they wanted to build a big net long in the SRW wheat market. So there's a lot of uh there's a lot of interest here, and it's actually, you know, you look at corn, we're still south of$5. It's it's actually kind of disappointing how that the prices have have not acted better in corn in particular, given the uh big fun buying.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

If you guys have not checked out our premium content, you sure need to do so. Joe, can you tell our viewers about some of our recent premium videos?

Corn Belt Rain, HRW Wheat Areas

SPEAKER_00 6:54

What is Goldman Sachs telling customers about grains? Goldman Sachs is one of the most famous and influential investment banks on the planet, and they had a research note out to their customers last week. I ran through it, reviewed it, gave you kind of my take-home big picture items. Um, there's people with a lot of money that are reading this stuff, and people with a lot of money are talking about the grain markets, which isn't something that we haven't seen a whole lot of recently. Chris Barron was on Friday. How has Iran really impacted production costs? He ran through updated data sets of his own customers' uh corn soybean budgets for 2026. And uh there's there's some nuance here, and it's actually the the situation as it relates to corn fertilizers is quite a bit different, as a matter of fact, than maybe the media would lead you to believe. I talked about great uh cash, grain marketing on Friday, corn soybeans and wheat. If you guys are the decision maker in your farm operation, you should check out the premium subscription. We cover everything from grain marketing to crop insurance to weather to policy, farm budgeting, you name it, we talk about it. The the premium subscription is geared toward the farm decision maker, whereas our show here on YouTube or the podcast, it's it's a news show. But if you're looking for information that's going to really help you to make decisions in your farm operation, check out the premium deal, guys.$50 per month. You can cancel at any time. No other fee, no other obligation, nobody will try to sell you anything else. Give that deal a shot this morning.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Much of the U.S. Corn Belt will see substantial rainfall this week. Rainfall is likely to begin accumulating across large areas of Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan, and Indiana during the middle part of this week for the vast majority of the U.S. corn belt. The early plant date for corn is April 10th. Heavy rainfall during the first week of expected planting is not necessarily ideal, although moisture is needed in many areas. Unfortunately, US HRW wheat areas may miss forthcoming rains to the east.

Acreage/Stocks Report

SPEAKER_00 8:42

So to go back to the corn belt, um, southern areas of the corn belt, I guess I'd call them their early plant dates April 1st, which is what Wednesday? Um, and then April 5th for a lot of areas, April 10th for a lot of areas, northern areas of the country, April 15th would be your early corn plant date. When a lot of people would start if this rain wasn't coming. And I don't know exactly how it's going to impact the whole planting situation. I guess it depends on is this like a one-and-done event or does it continue? Uh, not necessarily the best timing. You would have liked to see the, and we did see some rains, I guess, um, previously, but you know, you you don't want to start off the planting season really wet, and and maybe we will in some areas. As it relates to HRW weak country, it looks to me as if the rains coming in the next seven days are going to be too far east and they're not gonna get far enough west to have a big enough impact on the crop. So I think that there are uh or could be some developing crop issues as it relates to the HRW weak crop. Even the extended forecast keeps a lot of rain out of the western part of Kansas, eastern Colorado, places like that. And that's where we really need to see the rain. I wouldn't hang my hat on these extended forecasts. The rains that we were supposed to see, if we were going back to last week's forecast, was like this coming weekend, like Easter weekend. And it looks like a lot of that stuff is going to miss uh to the east.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

U.S. farmers are expected to shift acreage from corn to soybeans as the Iran war has disrupted global trade and driven up key input costs such as fertilizer and fuel. Analysts project corn acreage will decline by 4.5% compared to last year, while soybean plantings are expected to increase by 5.2%. Spring wheat acreage is also under pressure from rising input costs and ample global supplies, with plantings forecast to fall 1.5% to their lowest level since 1970. Tuesday's USDA report, however, may not fully reflect rising war-related costs or changes in planting decisions as it is based on early March surveys.

Flash Sale

SPEAKER_00 10:34

You could expend a lot of mental energy trying to analyze the corn acreage situation, and I would not do that because these numbers are meaningless and generally useless. USDA is gonna put a corn acreage number out on a Tuesday tomorrow. And I'll say that they're gonna be right within 4 million between like this report and final. Um, last year's report was terrible, it's incredibly inaccurate. It's gonna be very difficult to get a good read this year because the surveys were being taken as the Iran situation was unfolding. One thing I talked about with Chris on Friday was this, you know, um fertilizer prices spiked following the Iran thing. But guess what? Corn prices rallied also, and the rise in corn price is basically enough to offset the rise in fertilizer prices. So why, therefore, are we expecting corn acres to drop 4 million? It's a good question. I'm a little higher with my personal corn acreage estimate. I think we're gonna be north of 96, personally. That's my kind of guess for the final Tuesday's number, who the hell knows? It's it's it's a useless, kind of meaningless number. There's supposed to be a billion bushels uh more corn out in the country uh this year than they were last year as of March 1st. And that would make sense given some of the stuff we've seen in uh Western Corn belt basis in particular.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

USDA reported a flash sale on Friday. U.S. exporters sold four million bushels of soybeans to unknown destinations for delivery during the current marketing year.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

We're typically not going to sell a ton of soybeans on the export market, old crop beans at least this time of year, but uh good to see something. What did uh cattle do on Friday?

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Uh cattle futures were sharply higher on Friday. Live cattle were up 235 to 397. Feeders saw gains ranging from 412 up to 807. Fat cattle trade was light last week with trade limited to the northern plains, where prices were established at 235, which was steady with the prior week.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

All right. So I guess there was some escalation, you could call it in Iran over the weekend and overnight, but uh the stock market's higher. It doesn't seem to care. SP's up 30 points, a Dow's up 200, crude oil is up 223 in the May WTI at 10187. That's the highest we've been in a little while. Everybody have a great week. We'll be back on Tuesday.