Yesterday we hosted an exciting live webinar with Barchart’s Head of Commodities, Michael Browne, and grain market expert, Alan Brugler. If you attended, we hope you enjoyed the webinar! If you weren’t able to attend we’ll fill you in now!

Alan Brugler kicked off the webinar with an overview of the corn and soybean markets. There were two major USDA reports released recently, the Grain Stocks Report and the Planting Intentions report. Alan provided an analysis of this report and compared the previously forecasted estimates to the final estimates. 

As Alan explains, the wheat number provided by the USDA was about a million acres larger than expected, specifically the winter wheat. The corn and soybeans plantings were much smaller than the trade guesses, which caused the corn and soybean markets to go limit up in less than two minutes!  

Alan then further discussed the outlook for the corn and soybean markets, including the soy to corn crop ratio, which has been hovering around 2.6 for most of this year. Alan explains that the soybean market has been trying to move acreage away from corn and into beans from other crops for quite some time, so he was expecting a big rise in soybean acres, however the USDA report showed the rise was below expectations.  

Finally Alan discussed wheat stocks. He explained how the USDA report showed we were fairly tight on wheat and wheat production has been declining for years, Wheat crops are not as financially attractive as corn and soybean crops are and it’s stocks are starting to show that. 

Alan then passed it over to Michael Browne, for the second part of the webinar. Michael started with an overview of Barchart’s services for agribusinesses, including, cmdtyView, Marketplace and content management.

cmdtyView provides access to global exchange data, physical commodity prices, futures execution, and advanced analytics delivered to your browser in one powerful solution.

Marketplace connects grain elevators and agribusinesses to their farmers through branded apps, offer management, and instant messaging.

Our content management solutions provide powerful distribution tools for grain merchandising. Currently, around 400 agribusiness clients use either our hosted websites or our content to power their websites. We also have data feeds to power proprietary applications, web portals, etc.

Michael discussed how these enterprise solutions integrate the whole workflow from the producer to the grain merchandiser, providing them with everything they need to do business.

Michael then provided an overview of our ERP integrations, which allow Marketplace users to easily see what grain they currently have in place across different locations, display amount data, the status of payment, and more. Marketplace Apps provide your producers all the information they need, including balances and settlements - in addition to scale tickets and contracts. 

Michael and Alan then opened it up to questions from the viewers, which provided insight into basis and spread predictions for soybeans, the accuracy of the current soybean production area forecast is, and more! This recap only scratches the surface, so make sure to watch the full livestream here! To learn more about the solutions available from cmdty, please visit our website.