Navigating market noise: weekly market outlook, Oct. 27th-31st

Jeremy: Good morning and welcome everybody to another Ag View Pitch. We're looking at the marketing week of October 27th through the 31st, the scary Halloween week. With me is Greg McBride, Director of Brokerage from Allendale Inc. Greg, how are you doing today, bud?

Greg

McBride: I'm great, Jeremy. How are you doing?

Jeremy: You know what? I'm doing good. We're probably— if I had to You know, off the top of my head, I think we're probably, oh, I would say 50% done with corn. So we're trucking along, have had some of the harvest gremlins show up with, you know, within our leg and, you know, the dryer and just a few other things. You know, it's kind of the dog days of harvest at this point in time, but good yields and stuff's drying well, still standing good here in Northern Illinois. So I really can't complain. We've had overall really good harvest weather.

Greg

McBride: Yeah. And you got a little frost on the pumpkin this morning, so, uh, yeah.

Jeremy: Yep. Yep. It's that time of year. You know, I'm, I'm wearing a sweatshirt here and, and I'm, I'm, I'm not quite sure I really have enough clothes on yet. I'm still like, oh man, I maybe I should put a jacket on. So I don't know if I'm ready for this, but it happens every year in Northern Illinois. So what the hell? I guess, uh, if I want a warmer climate, I better move somewhere else. Yeah.

Greg

McBride: Uh, well, we know that's not gonna happen.

Jeremy: No. Nope, not at all. So well, I appreciate you joining us. Like I said, we've got this scary week here. You know, Ag Views lucky enough to put me on the scary week. And so I guess, you know, this might be the title of the podcast you and I were talking beforehand here. And, you know, there's a lot going on, you know, as far as news, things being talked about, but, you know, nothing's really happening. So like, you know, As we were saying, and again, this is the farmer perspective. I, you know, we've been busy with the harvest. And so, you know, I'm listening to podcasts, you know, I'm not really digging in at my computer like I would. And, you know, this morning I woke up thinking about what are we going to talk about today? And I thought, there's a lot, but really nothing. So, you know, what's— where are we at?

Greg, what's your thoughts on kind of where we're at with all of the news and what we're trading on these days?

Greg

McBride: So we've got the APEC summit in South Korea. This is— you've got a bunch of different countries getting together, having this big meeting. And we've known for a few months that the target was to have Trump and Xi meet to talk about trade before this meeting. So we— this is the administration we work with, obviously, that they they're going to put information out whether or not it's actually news. We talked about this a few weeks ago when President Trump put out a Truth Social saying that he was going to meet with President Xi in a few weeks at the APEC summit in South Korea, and they were going to talk about soybeans. Well, like I said, we've known about that for months at this point. And as I said, you better talk about soybeans. That's the number one export from the United States to China. So if we're not talking about, about soybeans, what are we doing?

I know, I know the rare earth thing is a brand new, exciting deal that everybody wants to talk about. But when it comes to what really matters to us, what matters to you and everybody in your backyard, it's that soybean sales, you know, and right now it's a goose egg. So whether if you're going to increase by 100%, you're going to increase by 1,000%. 100% of zero is still zero.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: Yeah. So that's what we're dealing with is what is the next, without the government data, what's the next headline and is it bullish? Is it bearish? Is it whatever?

Jeremy: Yeah. Because you're 100% right. And even when you think about this, the talks with China, I mean, does this, you know, let's say at the end of the day, successful meeting, United States gets everything they wanted. Does it really matter for this soybean crop? I mean, the buy, you know, everything I'm hearing is that, you know, China's buying patterns, you know, this is really a 2026 initiative and not anything to affect 2025. Am I right on that?

Greg

McBride: Yes. So let's, let's kind of lay it out in a couple of different ways. So if you look at, you know, the buying patterns that they do, they start buying from us in, say, June, July, August for fall delivery. So they're buying 2 to 3 to maybe even 4 months out for what's going to be delivered once our, once our crop is ready. They do the same thing for Brazil. This is one of those, this is one of those countries. China is, you know, one of the only countries that kind of does it this way where they buy so much that they're buying 2, 3, 4 months in advance, just because they know that's when their needs pop up. A lot of other countries are just, you know, buying hand to mouth.

Jeremy: It's—

Greg

McBride: yeah, let's get it, we'll have it in 2 weeks, we're good to go. So you will typically have your best opportunity to sell, to sell US beans to China, and probably at the cheapest rate from about June, July, until the second week in December, because that's when they'll shift to Brazil, because Brazil is then ready at the end of January, beginning of February to be able to start shipping out. So from a seasonal perspective, yes. Let's go back to 2020 when we, when we had the original trade deal, you know, after the '18 and '19 trade war, you get that first, that those trades or those that trade deal that come through the Phase 1 trade deal. And, you know, I don't think they actually did what they said they were going to. And I think the Trump administration is looking into that, but I don't think it matters. But you go back and you look at that, we signed that.

I think it was mid-January or mid-February. It might have been like— might have been Valentine's Day for all I remember. But yeah, we, you know, obviously the world shut down because of COVID for quite a while. That didn't stop them needing actual soybeans. We still were shipping soybeans. But we didn't see the bulk of those purchases really start to kick in until later on. So that could have been the excuse, always COVID. But in general, they still were buyers of our soybeans for the next marketing year. So if you get a deal done, let's say the off chance you get a deal done, you know, October 30th, you know, next week or this, this week, actually. And you get something in place, you've theoretically got about 6 weeks before things really shift to Brazil anyway. And then we've already known that they've been buying Argentina beans.

So whatever they bought right now, who's to say that they don't have themselves set up through January already?

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. And so I guess, you know, one of the things that I guess I'm trying to relate this to is, you know, is to the actual farmer, the producer, right? And so we get a deal done. Great. You know, we know when China buys US soybeans. I guess my point is, is that, you know, from a producer standpoint, we get a deal done. What changes our fundamentals on beans for our 2025 crop? Besides just, you know, the euphoria of getting a deal done, you know, we still are going to have You know, not a lot of use for them. We're still going to be, you know, we're at until that buying happens. So does it make sense to— I mean, does it make sense to store and hold? Does it make sense to just, you know, dump them and live to fight another day? Because, you know, we'll make that back up in the next year.

You know, I guess that's, you know, what I was trying to get through is that, you know, there's— if they sign a deal tomorrow, bean— that doesn't mean beans have to go to $12 the next day.

Greg

McBride: No, but psychologically, the market will react, you know, 100%. Psychologically, the market will react. Will it change anything? Probably not. That's why I would, I would be looking at looking to producers and saying, hey, I'd sell some. Yeah, it's awesome because this is not a, this is not a situation where it necessarily has to hold. You know, you're going to get that initial euphoria. Of a deal. But until that actually turns into bushels, that's a situation where— when does the USDA reckon— well, we're shut down right now anyway.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Greg

McBride: Do anything. But when does the USDA recognize the blank spot from Chinese sales? Yep. These Chinese sales, I mean, if you run the numbers, I've probably said them 100 times over the course of the last, you know, 3 months, 6 months, whatever it is. But they buy 23— let's— last year they bought about 23 million metric tons from us. Let's put that in US terms because we don't, we don't use the metric system. That's 750 to 850 million bushels.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: Right now that number is at zero.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: So we're talking about a 300 million bushel ending stocks roughly from what the last thing that the USDA told us. Dip the yield a little bit, maybe yield comes down to 50, 51, something like that. Maybe it's a 52 bushel, bushel yield, whatever. Yeah, that's not going to change anything. Acres are where they're at. They're not going to adjust that. At some point, the USDA has to come in and recognize deficit of what we've seen for the exports. So if it's 850 million bushels, let's just say they do buy zero from us. When does the USDA actually tack on 850 million bushels and put us up to over a billion in carryout? Yeah, they won't do it.

And that's not realistic, because we'll have others that come in, we're talking about Japan wanting to buy, you know, this is the most recent thing with the new Japanese Prime Minister is that, you know, she's conservative, and she's, she's wanting to talk to Trump about F-150s and soybean purchases. Well, yeah, they already buy our soybeans, but they're not going to, they're not going to fill China's void.

Jeremy: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, I think you— I hate to cut you off, but I think you made a really good point. And then this is kind of where I was trying to get at is that, you know, And this might be just with all commodities, you know, in the Corn Belt that grows corn and soybeans, is that, you know, if we're waiting for— yeah, I hear a lot of people talking about, you know, corn fundamentals, corn, you know, we're friendly, corn can go up, soybeans can go up. But at the end of the day, you know, I almost feel, you know, just on my farm sitting here and you kind of reiterated it, is that, you know, you have to, you have to kind of try to trade headlines because the headlines are what's moving this because the fundamentals behind it, you know, we still have issues that we've got to work through.

And so if you're hoping that just because a deal got done that you can hold over till March, March may come and the fundamentals are recognized and, you know, it's, it's not the euphoria anymore. It's okay, we've got this, we got to chew through. So I'm glad you kind of went through that because that was my point is that, you know, what does it really change? Should we— what, you know, should we be trading headlines? And if we get a little rally, Hey, let's move on it.

Greg

McBride: Well, that is— that's exactly right. The problem, the problem with trading the headlines and a lot of people believe, oh, the price has to go up. Well, yes, but no. I mean, like I said, if you, if you factor in— let's just be conservative. Let's factor in $300 million that we lose out of, out of purchases to China from China. Yeah. Now you're talking about $550 to $600 million in carryout. That still projects you down to $9.50, $9.75. So any rally that you get on a deal, you have to take advantage of that with, you know, maybe it's cash sales, or maybe it's, you know, I'm going to be stubborn, but you need to like, you know, get some hedges in place or something like that. You know what happens, you know, obviously, you throw beans in the, in the, in the bin, whether they go to town and they sit in storage and you pay storage on them. Or they sit in your bin, they shrink.

You know, one of the reasons that we will typically, you know, they turn faster than corn does. So we'll hold on to corn for longer. Soybeans, it's like, well, if I have them, if I have them in April, that's a long time to hold them. What if, what if we get a deal, but we don't see the demand until way later on? You're still sitting at You're still range-bound right now. $10.50, $10.75 down to essentially $9.80, $9.90. So it's, you know, that dollar does make a difference. I think from talking to different producers and whatnot, you've seen some of the basis levels improve a little bit. Yeah, but up a couple— up until a couple of weeks ago, there were still places that weren't even taking beans unless you had them.

Jeremy: Presold.

Greg

McBride: So, you know, you still have those issues. I think it— and I hate to sound so negative on it, but it's like just trying to be realistic with farmers. And kind of, you kind of have to give them the shit sandwich every once in a while and say, hey, listen, here's the problem you have. You have— I mean, I want to tell everybody the price can only go up from here. And there's people that make a good living by doing that. The problem is, It's not realistic right now. Yeah. And if you could get that, then sure, let's, let's go. I would love to because maybe at this time next year, we're talking about $12 or $13 beans, maybe.

Jeremy: Yeah. Well, you know, I think to your point, I mean, Chris, Chris Barron here says this all the time. And I, you know, maybe rephrasing what you just said there is that you can be happy, or you can be informed. And being informed, knowing the numbers and where you're at, always beats just, you know, being happy. And so to your point, sometimes you do have to swallow a shit sandwich and realize, you know, where we're at and what it takes to live to fight another day. I mean, you know, the problem I have seen too with trading headlines is that, you know, it's fast and furious. You know, the fundamentals don't back it up.

And so, you know, one of the things I would say for anybody listening is that, you know, if you have if you have price targets where you're saying these are the dollar amounts that I'm willing to let go and I'm willing to, you know, these are the benchmarks that say at this price I can sustain and move forward and live to fight another day, you probably better get either those hedges in place or get those offers out there because, you know, it could happen overnight. It could happen. I mean, it, The trade— trading headlines is fast and furious, I guess, is what I would say.

Greg

McBride: It is, and it's sometimes very unreliable because— oh, we'll give you an example. Earlier— well, let's see, what day was it? Might have been like the 20th or the 21st. We had President Trump speaking to a bunch of Republican lawmakers, and as he's talking, he talks about this, uh, this meeting with, uh, with China. So this is all in a, in the, the same 10-15 minute stretch. He says we're gonna, we're gonna have a meeting with, uh, with China. We've got a lot of things to discuss. We're gonna, we're gonna have a great negotiation. And then immediately follows that with, we may not even meet with them. You know, we may not. And it's like, wait, what? So the market, the market dropped 3 or 4 cents, which that's, that's not a huge deal in soybeans. To see up, down 3, 4 cents is nothing big.

But when it happens in the span of a minute and it triggers a volume of, say, 7,000 contracts in, in 2 or 3 minutes, that's a big spike. That's a— that's— I hate to say it's a manipulation type thing, but it is. And it didn't— at the end of the day, it didn't necessarily hurt or help soybeans to hear either of those things. But it certainly is one of those, you know, when you get a headline trade, it can hurt just as much as it can help. And you go back to April 2nd, the Liberation Day, when we put all the tariffs in, look at what happened in the stock market that day. Look at what happened throughout most markets that day. Dive bomb, just fell apart. One week later, I'm sitting in a hotel working from Springfield, Illinois, and the markets go ballistic. Well, what do we do? We paused all of those tariffs we put on the previous week.

And there was a tweet that was put out or a Truth Social that was put out a few hours earlier. Today is a good day to buy. Markets go to the moon. And it's like, yeah, if you knew ahead of time, you change your system.

Jeremy: But yep. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you. Well, maybe, maybe let's switch gears here. We've been talking about beans and, you know, all of the lovely things that come along with that. Let's talk corn. What's your thoughts on corn? I mean, we've seen mild, you know, steady kind of increase on that in the last, you know, week and a half. You know, tell me your thoughts around that.

Greg

McBride: We are about as range-bound as you can get. I love corn. It's, I mean, it's the, it's, it's one of those markets that can give you great opportunities. It's one of those markets that can break your heart. But in, in the case of right now, you've got two things. So you've got a, a massive crop out there. And I don't care if it's a 182, 183, 181 yield against 90 million harvested acres. That's a massive crop. Yep. So the ending stocks are working against us. Ethanol is a big deal. That's about a third of our, of our usage. There's a lot of conversation about this, this E15, this ethanol all year round deal. If that were to happen, that would be, that would be bullish. Maybe tack on another billion bushels of usage. Yeah, fantastic. Great. We know that the export demand is phenomenal. There's a, there's a downside to that.

Because the export demand is so good, or because of other factors, export demand is really good. Let's, let's talk about that. Why is that? Well, we're not bringing in cattle from Mexico.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: So Mexico has to buy all that corn that we would normally feed here so that they can feed the animals that are stuck in, you know, in their domestic feedyards. Yeah, so it's, it's tradeoffs. I'm not going to argue though, the demand is, is good elsewhere as well. So we'll take that. That's fine. I want to see corn go up. I want to see corn break through this $4.32 and three-quarters gap that it's got. $4.40 was good, was good support for a long time. And then we broke that. The big thing in the corn market though, right now is look at the wheat market. Wheat is priced as a feed grain, and it continues to make new lows, essentially every few weeks.

So if your main competitor for feed continues to make new lows, and everywhere in the world grows or uses wheat, or both, you run into a situation where you're going to be limited on your upside in corn, because you're, you've got an anchor around your around your waist from the wheat.

Jeremy: Yeah, because right now a lot of the demand for corn is in a feed value, right? Yep. Um, God, I had something I wanted to just ask you and I just lost it. I am— oh, I, I remember. Um, you know, one of the things in, in, um, on the corn side, I've seen you present, you know, uh, you and Steve, and you guys do a really good job of this, so I'm kind of putting you on the spot and if you don't know this, that's totally fine. But if you were to say, hey, this is what, you know, our estimated, you know, because we're lacking government reports.

And so, you know, can we— what I'm thinking is that can we go through this exercise and just say, hey, on your side of this deal, you know, what, what Allendale thinks is the, you know, the real number for the yield on corn and how that equates to projected ending stocks and where we— where do you guys see really is the true potential value of corn with your guys's estimates? And I know you've done that before. And I'm just curious if you guys have that now, or you've got some of that data, you know, that we can bring value to the listeners on that.

Greg

McBride: Yeah. So if you go off of what we know from the most recent USDA information, which was the September 30th Grain Stocks Report. That number came in about 200 million bushels higher than expected. It's a, it's a pencil whip category that they use called feed and residual. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily equate to what we actually feed all the cattle, the hogs, poultry, whatever out there, all the deer and all that stuff, whatever. They just use it to say, okay, well, we actually have a a bigger pile than what we thought we did. So we'll put it on this. That projects you to about a 2-point— you know, all things being equal, that projects it at $2.3 billion in carryout.

Jeremy: Okay.

Greg

McBride: Bring your yield down a little bit. Like I said, we were at 186.5, 186, whatever, on the September WASDE report. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, and I, I'm not going to say we're going to do it if we get a November report or if we get a December report, but if we get the January report when they finalize some of this stuff, I think you probably are closer to a 1.82 yield, which is still a record. It's phenomenal. Yeah. At the end of the day, we're probably still talking about a $1.9 to $2.1 billion carryout. Okay, because we, in this whole situation, we don't necessarily know how good or bad exports have been. You know, that's one of those things where we knew for a long time exports were phenomenal, that was helping us.

We know what the ethanol numbers are, because we still get the EIA data, which ethanol has been good for about the last 4 weeks, at least versus what it was the previous year or the whatever. So we're okay with that. But we don't necessarily move the needle on ethanol very much because it's a pretty standard number. It's about a third of our usage. So I think, I think at the end of the day, you're talking about maybe a $1.9 to a $2 billion in carryout. It's still burdensome. There's some things that they could, they could adjust that would continue to help us. But I'm talking, I'm going out to like January, February, or March before I think we actually see those numbers. I don't think they do it all in one fell swoop.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: So at those levels, they reserve the right to change it later on anyway.

Jeremy: Yeah. So at those levels, where do you see the, you know, the actual price point or value of corn at a 1.92, you know, 2 carryout on this?

Greg

McBride: $4.40, $4.50. Okay, like that. And at which point, you know, this is where you kind of have— you start having those conversations of, well, not that the old crop is completely gone, or that we've— we need to forget about it. But we're going to want to start to look at next year's crop. And, you know, yes, you still have corn in the bin, or you've got corn in town, or you've, you know, like you said, you're only about halfway done harvesting at this point. Yeah. So you've got to take a little bit of action on that. You've got to figure out whether or not— if it's going to sit in the bin until June, let it sit in the bin until June. But you got to make sure you get some coverage on it. But then you also got to start thinking about acreage for next year. And the way things are going, if you don't get a Chinese trade deal, we probably have no reason to plant.

80 or 81 million acres of beans, you're probably closer to 92, 93, 95 million acres of corn.

Jeremy: Yep.

Greg

McBride: So it's still, it's still burdensome, which means that if you get a, you get a rally to, or somewhere between $4.65 and say $4.85 in new, new corn, Dec 26th, place to get started.

Jeremy: Yeah. Well, and I guess I, you know, my dad and I, we just had this conversation last night. We were talking about, you know, where Dec corn of '26 was at. And it was roughly where it was that at the beginning of this year where I wanted to start selling corn, you know, and I guess the fundamental in what we talked about last night is that, you know, if that's the worst sale I have, I'm happy. Yeah. You know, and so to your point, it's a place to get started. You know, it's— I always think, you know, and he's been on here. I know, you know, Joe Paulson, you know, we've— we always talk. He's been on this, this podcast here hosting it. And I think there's a lot of validity to what he says. You know, it's hard at times to be marketing two crops at one time, you know, and, you know, sometimes it's just a lot easier to close the books so you make better decisions on the one coming up.

Yeah. And, you know, not to say to dump it all and be, you know, extremely unprofitable, but, you know, there does come a point where you need to get started. You need to start making some sales. If they're the worst ones you make of the year, great. You know, and if they end up being your best ones, that's still a good decision too.

Greg

McBride: Yeah, we have a broker in our company that is always watching those new crop spreads and whatnot. And he's really good at that type of forethought, is, you know, thinking about where we're going to be when we plant. And he guys, this is probably a good spot to be getting started. And then you have this, this, you know, there's that fear of missing out. You know, everybody's got it. And like you said, it's, it's what if this is my worst sale? Oh, man, I sold, I sold $5,000, $10,000. I sold 20%. Sorry, I'm in an office with automatic lights here.

Jeremy: I thought you like inverted your camera or something.

Greg

McBride: No, I sold— you sell 20, you know, 15, 20%, and then the market goes up 40 cents, 50 cents. And then, you know, what happens is you sit back and say, oh, I'm not making any more sales.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: And then the market falls off and it's like, oh, shoot. Some of the best sales that we've done— and this is not marketing advice whatsoever— but some of the best sales that we've done in the last couple couple of years have been done in February or March.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: And it's, it's, it's just purely, we come out of, out of it, and you start looking at it and saying, well, what do we know is going to happen? Well, between February and June, every farmer that has old crop needs to sell. Well, farmers are their own worst enemy when it comes to stopping a rally. And it's not their fault. They, you know, that's part of the cycle. You have to sell it eventually. Yep. It's not— I'm not trying to place blame on that. That is just one of those things. Nothing will stop a rally like a, like, you know, a wave of farmer selling. The funds can do whatever they want. Funds can go long, they can go short, they can do whatever the heck they want. But if you get a rally, farmers should be taking advantage of it.

Jeremy: Yep. My dad always calls this and, you know, I can't remember who he talked to. I saw a talk, but they're similar thinking. And it's exactly, I think, what you're saying here, Greg, is that, you know, reward the market. You know, and that's, that's what my dad talks about. He goes, I like to reward the market when it goes up. And, and I heard— excuse me— I heard somebody say, hey, you know, when you're selling, um, you know, if you were to sell 5, you know, let's say you were to sell 5% at $450, if it goes to $460, then sell 10% at $460. And again, this isn't marketing advice, so, you know, I'm just saying these are just, you know, these are, um patterns or things that farmers have issues with.

But, you know, and if it goes up even more than double that sale so that you get that weighted average of in that higher category, what typically happens is that, you know, it's the opposite. When you got $4.50 corn, you sell 5%. Now it goes to $4.60, you sell 2% because it could go higher. But then on the bottom side, when it goes down, we start doubling our sales on the fear that it's going to go lower. And, you know, so I guess that's kind of I guess maybe a different way of looking at maybe what you were talking about, Greg.

Greg

McBride: Um, but the big thing with farmers is, and it, you know, like I said, it's a— you guys, you guys put your blood, sweat, and tears into this stuff.

Jeremy: It's—

Greg

McBride: you almost get married to it. And it's, it's one of those things where you, you get emotional over it. And that's where, you know, somebody like me can come in and I get emotional just because I want to be right. But yeah, yeah. Um, the, the whole thing comes in with I just want that next nickel. I want that next $0.10. And sometimes good enough is good enough. You know, I can go back and, you know, you bring up Joe. Joe and I have been, you know, have talked for years. And I, you know, I've said it to him a bunch of times. I'm like, you're never going to sell the high. And Joe will always step in one time and say, I did once.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: And how long has Joe been doing this? How long has his dad been doing this?

Jeremy: Oh, yeah.

Greg

McBride: How long has your dad been doing this? Oh, yeah. Never going to sell the high. Maybe once. Maybe we get, you know, Yeah, the sun shines, but once in a while. But that was the whole thing.

Jeremy: In full disclosure, that's not a dig on Joe or his father.

Greg

McBride: No, no, no.

Jeremy: I mean, we're all like that. My dad has said the same thing. He said, you know, he said to me, he goes, Jerem, I think I've hit it, you know, once or twice I've gotten really lucky. And, you know, that goes back to our fundamentals at Ag View of knowing your cost of production. You got to know where you're at. You got to know what's profitable. And I guess as we close out maybe this podcast and corn itself is that, you know, I'm with you. And I think these are the things that we need to be considering is that, you know, getting these numbers lined up now, because if we do have some news or some fundamentals that make sense for us to start making sales, we better get them on the books. Because in the long run, like you talked, we don't get a deal done. And the beans are where we're at. Doesn't make sense to plant beans. I mean, it just doesn't from your books.

And so naturally, that shifts to other profitable crops, which will oversupply. So if we're sitting here thinking that corn is going to rally back to, you know, $5 or $4.80, and that's our marketing plan, you know, we could be really disappointed if we don't get some things done here. So So yeah, I guess maybe on my side of it closing out, I was just saying, hey, make sure, don't let the dog days of harvest get away from us. Let's know where our cost of production is, not stretch for that other nickel, start looking at what we think our costs are going to be for '26 because on some headlines or where we're at here in the next couple of weeks, we could get to where we're making a little bit. We're not making a lot, but at least we're not losing either. So I guess that would be my little deal. So Before we close out, I guess I'll give you the final word, Greg. You can, you can rebuttal.

You could say something else. We could talk weather, anything you want.

Greg

McBride: So it's just a thought. I mean, you know, we know that we've got the FOMC meeting this week. You've got the expectation that we're going to cut rates. We, we've got the expectation that we're going to cut rates in December. What does that bring about for us? For us? That's something that producers, you know, they know, but they need to, they need to, to think about what's, what's, what's that phenomenon mean for us. And this is where, you know, I kind of, I kind of throw ideas out at people like, okay, if you cut rates in general, you can start to let some inflation slip back into, into the market. Yep. That's helpful. We want to see corn prices go up. We want to see bean prices go up, whether it's, you know, artificially or not. That's going to help us.

The thing to remember is that just because your corn and bean prices go up doesn't mean that your input prices are not going to go up with it or more.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Greg

McBride: And so you have to be careful about, about that kind of stuff and not just say, Hey, you know, corn and beans are going up. That's great. Think about, think about locking stuff in for inputs, you know, ahead of these, these rate cuts, because I don't think unless there's some other massive issue coming up, I don't think we're going to see them raise rates anytime soon. So if you continue to cut and you do start to see inflation creep back up to 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4%, all of the stuff that you pay for that takes away from the actual value of your corn and beans is gonna go up with it. And then the other thing to think about is when you do cut rates, you bring rates down, what, you know, gives the— it gives banks and other financial institutions that opportunity to refinance.

Farmers know how to refinance, you know, maybe you can lock in a lower rate on your operating loan or a loan on equipment or this, that, the other thing, whatever it is. You know, maybe that saves you a few bucks here and there. So there's, there's stuff out there that's, you know, it's— there's potential that you could see some benefit to the environment that's going on in this world. But you also can't just bury your head in the sand, just, you know, expect that when you wake up or you pull your head out in March that prices and everything is just gonna be hunky-dory. Dory. You've got to, you got to be watching it on a daily, weekly basis, sometimes hourly, just based off of the way that the, the news cycle goes.

Jeremy: Yep, I think that's great comments. Well, um, you know, and I like the perspective of, of, uh, you know, we're at that time where we could lock, uh, lock in some inputs, you know, take a look at some of the value of that if that happens, especially too ahead of, you know, we didn't even talk any of the, um you know, the potential, you know, tariff relief package or anything that's coming. I mean, you look at rates along with that, you know, it would set an environment up where you could see a little bit of inflation. So great, great comments on that, Greg. So, well, I guess I'll tell you what, we've been at it for maybe a half hour. We could probably talk for another 4, but 4 hours, but that doesn't help me get corn done today. And it doesn't help you help other farmers either. So I guess we'll close it out at this point.

I really appreciate you being on, you know, you, Allendale, you guys always have great comments. We've just been talking to Greg McBride, director of brokers from Allendale. Greg, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Jeremy. All right. And one thing I guess I'll just conclude with this. Chris didn't tell me to do this. I guess I'm doing this on my own. And that is, you know, for those of you listening, if you'd like to sign up for our our business conference. I do believe there's some seats still available for that business conference. So make sure you go to the Ag View website and sign up for that if you'd like to, if you'd like to join us and be a part of that. So with that, we'll conclude, and we appreciate everybody tuning in.