Market Report: Fairly Quiet Day

Corn closed fractionally lower today. This morning the Energy Information Administration reported ethanol stocks were up 700,000 barrels from the prior week. Ethanol production increased 6.000 barrels per day to 930,000 barrels per day. One of the co-products of ethanol production is dried distillers grains. This is very valuable livestock feed. China imported a lot of dried distillers grains to feed their livestock. Chinese imports of dried distillers grains in March were triple what they were in February. On top of that, corn exports to China were up 5.05 percent above the previous year.

Soybeans closed today down about 5 cents today. There was not a lot of new news for soybean traders to work with. Traders were talking about the spread of bird flu and concerns about meal demand. Unless the bird flu gets a lot worse in the big picture it will probably not have a noticeable impact on feed demand. Apparently the bird flu cannot survive outside of the host above 80 degrees. So, when it warms up hopefully the outbreak will die down.