The Fastline Blog

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 If one were to draw a line from near Wichita to south of Kansas City to north of St. Louis to Peoria to south of Chicago and then eastward along the Indiana/Michigan and Indiana/Ohio borders, the harvest has largely shut down once again to the north of that line given rains that [...]

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Tuesday, October 20, 2009 As expected we saw the weekly crop progress numbers show that this year’s corn and soybean harvests are progressing a record-slow pace. The soybean harvest was 30 percent complete nationally as of this past Sunday, which would be the least amount done for that date in at least the past 30 [...]

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Friday, October 9, 2009 Results of the October USDA crop report will certainly dominant “trade talk” today in the corn and soybean markets, but once those numbers are discounted the markets will still have to consider weather concerns. Flash flood warnings were posted early today for much of southwestern Missouri, northwestern Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, and [...]

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Thursday, October 8, 2009 Flood and flash flood watches are currently posted for the southeastern Plains through much of the Ohio River Valley, while freeze warnings were posted across the northern Plains. Based on that sentence alone, one can surmise that wet and cold weather continues to dominant the near-term forecast for the Nation’s midsection. [...]

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Wednesday, October 7, 2009 Early Thursday will find extensive rainfall from the southern Plains through Missouri, and that will mark the start of about a two-day stretch of very wet weather for a significant part of the Nation’s midsection. The eastern Plains and southeastern Corn Belt will be hit very hard with heavy rain for [...]

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Tuesday, October 6, 2009 A lot of progress was made in harvesting soybeans last week in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota that allowed the national soybean harvest to jump ten points to 15 percent complete. However, that is still 13 percentage points behind last year, 21 percentage points behind the five-year average…and there [...]

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The sun is shining on the final morning of Farm Science Review. Crowds are making their way into the gates early this morning and stopping by the Fastline booth to make sure they don’t miss out on the latest editions of Fastline. If you are going to be attending the show, make sure you stop [...]

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Thursday, September 24, 2009 This is the second week in row in which we have seen the corn and soybean markets gain some upside traction due to fears of a frost for the Midwest, but for the second week in a row it looks like anyone who bought the markets hoping for major damage is [...]

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Wednesday, September 23, 2009: Trying to determine if/when the 2009 growing season will end for the Corn Belt has been a difficult task as of late (some would almost call it almost a comedy of errors). Last week on a couple different occasions I stated that the Midwest would have to “dodge a couple bullets” [...]

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