Opening Comments 5-31-11 Grain Market Called weaker on Russia News to lift export ban

Markets are called mixed this morning behind a volatile over night session and supportive outside markets. 

When the overnight session was over old crop corn was up 2 cents, new crop corn was down 4, MPLS wheat was off 11 cents, KC wheat was down 17, beans where up a penny, and CBOT wheat was down 18 cents.  At 9:00 outside markets have European wheat up about 1 % (after being off nearly 5% yesterday), crude is up about 1.80 a barrel, and the equities are firmer with the DOW up 100 points.

The big news over the weekend was Russia lifting their wheat export ban; effective July 1^st.  Some rumors are already out there on business done because of this.  Many have expected this in the market for some time now; but the actual news lead to a hard sell off in the European wheat market; as yesterday European wheat lost nearly 5% which on 8.00 wheat is 40 cents and 10.00 wheat is 50 cents.  Last night our markets opened down rather hard on this news and the European weakness as we seen wheat down 35 cents or so on the CBOT; while the hard wheat’s where down nearly 30 at their lows. 

Despite the weakness seen where the overnight left off things at one time where quiet a bit worse as even old crop corn was 15 cents off of it’s overnight session lows.

We will have a crop progress update this afternoon which is expected to show corn planted in the 82-90% area and rather little change expected in spring wheat planting.  Crop conditions will also be out in this afternoon’s update.

This a.m. we will have an export inspections report out showing export shipments.

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