Looks like there could be some colder weather in the corn belt areas of the US which might provide some upside momentum.
Weather Market Commentary
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
While planting progress numbers this week for corn and soybeans may not have been as high as traders were expecting, they still showed that the planting pace this spring has been fairly quick. We had 70 percent of the Nation's corn in the ground as of May 7, and while that is 5 percentage points behind the pace of last year (and also lagged the pace of 2004 and 2000), it is still a good distance above the 64 percent pace for the 5-year average and thus 2006 will be considered as an "early" planted year for the Nation's corn crop. The Dakotas, Minnesota, and Indiana are the areas where corn planting this week was most notably behind the 5-year average. Probably getting more attention in the next few weeks will be the corn emergence pace, obviously because so much of the crop has already been planted but also because we are about to go into a very chilly weather pattern for the Midwest. As of this week, 25 percent of the Nation's corn had emerged, which was three percentage points above the 5- year average. It would not surprise me at all to see the emergence pace fall behind the 5-year average in a couple weeks, given how cold the middle part of May looks for the Midwest. Today still looks mild, and eastern parts of the region will stay mild tomorrow. After that though the weather pattern is cold for the entire region (but especially the north and the east), with signs that this cold will last through Wednesday of next week and a return to any sort of above-normal temperatures holding off until sometime around May 22. In the worst of conditions, I can envision days in which some locations have high temperatures that do not make it out of the 40s. In addition to the cold weather, northern and eastern parts of the region will see persistent rainfall, fairly significant in nature over the next couple of days and then more of a "nuisance" type variety for the end of the week, the weekend, and even into early next week. The above scenario means that corn emergence for the next couple of weeks will be slowing considerably, and corn that has emerged will take on a more "yellowish" appearance. We've been through this before though, as cold temperatures in May have been a common site in the Corn Belt in recent years (most notably in the second half of May of 2001, 2002, 2003, and also last year).
