It has been a warm week in southwestern Ontario and your loyal scribe switched over to planting soybeans. You all know that I call soybeans the great liars because everything about them is unpredictable.  It seems you have a wonderful looking crop of soybeans, and it doesn’t yield as well as you might expect. On the other hand, sometimes, soybeans look downright ugly and yield much more than your imagination could run wild. What will it be this year?

I don’t know, sometimes I think the soybeans are actually laughing at me when I plant them. It looks like I’m praying looking down at the ground checking the depth where I can find beans. Too often in this part of the country with our heavy clay soils we find that soybeans need a little bit of luck to get out of the ground. Hopefully that will not be the case this year.

As it is, Ontario will likely have more soybeans versus what originally was projected for this year. I was talking to a seed dealer today that said there was a lot of new orders for soybeans coming in. In this part of the country, it is getting late for corn and weather has been fickle. For instance, in my first planted soybean field I had threatening weather. There was a huge black cloud to the east. Later I found out a hamlet east of Dresden got 6 inches of rain from that storm cloud. Across Ontario precipitation might not have been that extreme but there are areas where switching into soybeans is going on.

It will likely mean that Ontario will have 3 million plus acres of soybeans this year challenging our merchandisers to get those beans out into markets.  Of course, there are also Ontario soybeans which are shipped by container to Asia into the non gmo market.  There is also everything in between.  American soybeans can show up here any given day. It’s all about basis opportunities.

As it is, American soybean shipments are down about 18% from a year ago and below USDA’s estimated pace. There have also been rumors about Chinese sales, but that is exactly what it is just rumors. You can bet that the Chinese will continue to resist buying American soybeans as long as Brazil can keep producing.  Needless to say, you have to ask yourself does a November futures price of $12.16 cents give you heartburn? I don’t think so especially when you look at over a dollar in appreciation in the soybean futures price since February 26.

Keep in mind that history tells us this is the time to be selling new crop grain. Whether it be April May June or July, those are the months with where seasonality kicks in and usually we get market opportunities.  That holds true wherever you farm and it’s especially true here in Ontario where the Canadian dollar continues to flutter in the $0.72 US range.

Of course, this coming weekend is a time when we often see market action in the grains. That’s because Memorial Day weekend is one of those three-day weekends like the 4th of July where sometimes trends are incubated one way or the other. It surely would be prudent during this time to have those standard market orders ready.

At the present time the wheat market has shown a little bit more resolved than usual with cash wheat prices in Ontario being approximately $8.60 for contract this July.  It’s always hard to get any type of wheat price appreciation but some of this has had to do with weather related problems in both Ukraine and Russia.  Of course, we know that it could be stolen away as fast as we got it. There is wheat everywhere in the world, but of course Russia is the biggest exporter of cheap wheat.  Any production problem there will definitely result in higher prices.

It surely is a long and winding road to payday. For instance, I’ve always told you when I plant my corn in the spring, I always try to imagine the journey that corn seed will have until I go through and harvest in November. In other words, there is a world of production risk ahead and who knows what that might be. The same might be said for the lowly soybean but of course as I told you before they are the great liars.  They will go through several iterations before I see what’s there at the end of the harvest rainbow.

The challenge of course is to measure all of the different marketing factors in an efficient manner to bring profitability to our farms in 2024.  Keep in mind that our markets are fluid and so is our risk management horizon.  Change is our only constant.  Good luck in the fields this week.