Tractor Wars Airs Tonight @ 7pm on Channel 12
- Naomi Blohm, TotalFarmMarketing.com
- John Reid, UofI Center for Digital Agriculture
- Neil Dahlstrom, Author of Tractor Wars
- Don Day, DayWeather.com
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- Naomi Blohm, TotalFarmMarketing.com
- John Reid, UofI Center for Digital Agriculture
- Neil Dahlstrom, Author of Tractor Wars
- Don Day, DayWeather.com
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What is Closing Market Report?
Celebrating 40 Years | 10,000 Episodes
Established 1985
The Closing Market Report airs weekdays at 2:06pm central on WILL AM580, Urbana. University of Illinois Extension Farm Broadcaster Todd Gleason hosts the program. Each day he asks commodity analysts about the trade in Chicago, delves deep into the global growing regions weather, and talks with ag economists, entomologists, agronomists, and others involved in agriculture at the farm and industry level.
website: willag.org
twitter: @commodityweek
From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is the closing market reported as the March 2025. I'm Todd Gleeson. Coming up, we'll talk about the commodity markets with Naomi Blum. She's at totalfarmmarketing.com. We'll hear from Neil Dahlstrom.
Todd Gleason:He's the author of Tractor Wars. That documentary based on the book that is will air tonight on our companion station WIL TV channel twelve at seven p. PM. And we'll hear too from John Reed. He's the director at the Center for Digital Agriculture here on campus and spoke at last week's All Day Ag Outlook about autonomous agriculture and his expectations for the farm in the Midwest, and we'll do all of that on this Tuesday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois.
Todd Gleason:Public media is public radio for the farming world online on demand at willag.org. Todd Gleason services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension. May corn at $4.70 and a quarter, opinion three quarters lower, December at $4.54 and a half, down a half cent, May beans today at $10 a lavender and a quarter, down two and three quarters, and new crop November at $10.15 and a half, down two and a quarter, wheat futures July soft red down 5 and a half cents. Naomi Blohm from totalfarmmarketing.com now joins us to take a look at the marketplace on this USDA report day. Naomi, first, I wanna go through a couple of paragraphs that USDA included in the World Ag supply demand Estimates report this morning about tariffs.
Todd Gleason:It says that the WASDE report only considers trade policies that are in effect at the time of publication. That's long running. We know that's the case. So here's how they're dealing with what's in place and not in place at the moment. They say US tariffs on Canada and Mexico have been suspended until April for all products covered under USMCA, which included most of the ag products.
Todd Gleason:Reciprocal tariffs are also scheduled to begin on April 2. However, until those go into effect, WASDE does not incorporate them into its forecast. Despite US tariffs being suspended, Canada's retaliatory tariffs remain in place. These are accounted for, says the agency in today's WASDE. And US tariffs on China and China's retaliatory tariffs on The US are assumed to remain in place.
Todd Gleason:So those numbers are all calculated into what USDA put out this morning. There weren't that many changes. Can you talk to me a little bit about what took place?
Naomi Blohm:Right. So looking at corn on today's USDA report, there were absolutely no changes from the March report back to the February report, back to the January report. So as we all remember, the January report is what was so game changer friendly. But now since that report, the USDA has made no, production or, ending stocks changes or demand changes on the February or today's report. So we're we're still sitting with an old crop situation that is really friendly for corn and really supportive, but we're always kind of on this anxious cusp of what will potential trade or tariff wars do for the future along with the corn market knowing that we're gonna see an increase of acres most likely down the road.
Naomi Blohm:Now on the soybean report today, they made just a minor tweak. They lowered the demand for seed, but they increased the demand for residual use. And the net result, though, was no change to ending stocks for soybeans. So no big news there on the domestic front. And then on the wheat market, what they did do was reduce export demand, and so that made the carryout number just a little bit larger.
Naomi Blohm:But, you know, today's report largely priced in. Usually, the March report doesn't have a lot of big expectations. Traders, I think, were curious to see if the USDA was gonna make any adjustments to Brazil and Argentina corn and soybean production numbers, and they did not. So without any fresh news to trade on, kinda probably gonna go back into a modest trading range, start to weather watch in South America, keep an eye on any geopolitical uncertainty going down the road. And now already shifting gears and focusing on the March 31 quarterly stocks and prospective planting report coming up now just in a couple weeks.
Todd Gleason:And it is important to note as well that USDA did make one other change in the soybean supply and demand table. That was to drop the season's average cash price, which will include sales that come from, the time that this was released today until we get to the end of the month of August by 15¢ to $9.95. No change on corn at $4.35, and they dropped the wheat number by a nickel to $5.55. Those were all for old crop. Did they make any changes in the global stocks that you, look made note of, for instance, in wheat?
Naomi Blohm:Yes. So they did increase the global wheat ending stocks up to 260 o 8,000,000 metric tons. That was up from two fifty seven point five six last month. So there was a production increase. That was where the ending stocks got a little bit larger.
Naomi Blohm:So they increased production for Russia slightly, and they increased production in Ukraine slightly. Also, Australian production increased slightly. So those three changes to global production is why the global ending stocks got a little bit bigger for the wheat.
Todd Gleason:Does this give you any pause as you think about it on the coarse grain side of things as it's related to the price of corn on the global stage, a price of wheat on the global stage, or or is it par for the course?
Naomi Blohm:I feel like we're just kicking the can down the road. We're waiting to get a better handle on harvest numbers coming in from South America. We're getting ready to just get a better handle on the next leg of corn production for that second crop, safrinha corn in Brazil. All of that corn is accounted for and spoken for, and the demand is there on the export front. So we're gonna be weather watching down there.
Naomi Blohm:And just, again, I feel like where the market is and the USDA maybe just trying to punt, kick the can down the road so we get a better handle more on the geopolitical issues out there. There there's still plenty of directions for this market to go depending on the the demand side going forward from The US perspective of exports. But when you think about how weather can change on a dime and how tight US corn ending stocks are and how global ending stocks of corn are still tight. There's reasons why this market could see that seasonal push higher into the Mother's Day, Father's Day time frame for a summer rally. So at the end of the day, you just gotta be ready for anything that unfolds.
Naomi Blohm:But right now, the focus for traders is gonna be more on South American weather, keeping an eye on our weekly export sales, and then also watching trade and tariff talk. That's gonna be the market mover probably for the next couple weeks.
Todd Gleason:Last week, you were in Denver at the Commodity Classic. Did you learn anything new from the farmers you spoke with?
Naomi Blohm:When they stopped by the booth, we talked a lot about weather, talking about how dry it is out there right now, talking about how if you compare this year's drought monitor index for this week of history versus the same week in 2012, the drought monitor index is substantially drier right now with even, like, two thirds of Illinois in that drought monitor index for a very modest drought beginning and even portions of Indiana. And that's very different from how 2012 started. So, lot of just thoughtful conversations, producers just, I think, really wanting to focus on whatever kind of a price rally we can see this summer, wanting to make sure that they're capturing it, focusing on cash sales, risk management. So it was a great show, and, again, a lot of thoughtful conversation.
Todd Gleason:Thank you very much.
Naomi Blohm:I appreciate it. Thank you.
Todd Gleason:That's Naomi Blum. She is with totalfarmmarketing.com. Let's turn our attention now to autonomous agriculture on the farm. Last week, during the All Day Ag Outlook, the director of the Center for Digital Agriculture here on the campus of the University of Illinois, John Reed, addressed this topic. He worked for John Deere for nineteen years and actually started here on campus prior to that.
Todd Gleason:I can recall working with him and his team on a self driving tractor in the late 1990s. He began his address during the all day outlook by discussing John Deere's autonomous agriculture. Last year, the manufacturer introduced autonomous tillage. This year, it extended that across other operations.
John Reid:Actually, really interesting with, with John Deere, they're also seeing that this farm management information system, which they call op center, links to other spaces even. So it's used for agriculture today. But if they're going to do autonomy in construction or in golf courses, these other places where there's labor and lots of machinery challenges, then you need to have the same kind of thing. So, what is in an autonomous tractor? First of all, it's a highly automated tractor to begin with.
John Reid:It doesn't have to be. Actually, you'll see a lot of companies that, will retrofit a vehicle by putting autonomy kit on existing tractor. But if it's highly automated, it's got more electronic surfaces that can be controlled through software, makes it easier to integrate with, with the autonomous vehicle. Actually, you're talking about the example in Champaign. That was the first, Magnum tractor from Case, IH that had a CAN bus on it.
John Reid:And, for a researcher, it was really a nice way of of doing autonomy because usually I had to give the tractors back every year to the company. I'd spend six months making it into a robot tractor And in three months doing work, well, with, with the changes of having electronics backbone and networks, it became, a one week job of converting, a tractor into an autonomous vehicle. So you've got this highly automated tractor. It's got an ability to sense what's happening in this environment. That's called situational awareness.
John Reid:Most commonly, we think about GPS telling where the vehicle is and how you could use that to plant straight or to do operations more efficiently through, through automatic guidance as an example. But it has other situational awareness that's needed too because the most important part of a tractor operating in the field is the operator sitting in the seat and sensing what's going on around the vehicle and, in the implement system, as well as, understanding what's happening in the field. Where do you wanna go? So it's just it's just not an issue of, that nobody does automatic tractoring or just driving the tractor around the field. You have an implement.
John Reid:You're doing a work task. You're trying to get a job done. And, and so there's extra sensors needed. Today, we're starting to see cameras and other types of sensing like that that are looking out ahead of the vehicle to look for people, to sense the roads, to, and then also those cameras are looking around the vehicle and seeing the implement and trying to understand is the implement doing its job. What's really interesting in this space, though, is is really not autonomy of the driving, but autonomy of the implement itself.
John Reid:And, if you've heard of precision spraying technology like, ExactApply from John Deere or other see and spray types of technologies, These technologies are putting the AI and the intelligence on the implement and, and allowing the implement to work at a level that's beyond what, has been possible in the past, being able to very precisely spray individual weeds and save chemical and get those benefits, but then still have an operator in his seat. And I think this is really kind of an important point about this is that, if we are going to be doing these operations, we need implements that can can be able to sense things that are working and not working that today depend on the operator or the farmer in the seat to detect. So think about a, debris on a on on a, on a plow shank or or some types of, effects, something breaking. Right now, a lot of the implements are not instrumented to be able to tell that something's wrong. So if you really are gonna have effective autonomy, you don't wanna kinda come back to the field where, a tractor just finished operating and seeing that it hadn't completed its operations.
John Reid:So anyhow, this intelligent implement side, is not really autonomy, but it is an element that also has to emerge if, if if autonomous agriculture is going to take place. So, again, we have the tractor. We have guidance systems. We have situational awareness or perception on the vehicle. And then usually, these are tied into, the farm some kind of farm management information system for autonomy.
John Reid:That system is used to essentially understand the fields where you're going to operate, understand, what kind of path plans and and AI is used to generate those plans to cover a field. And, for some operations like tillage, that's that's all you need. You basically can can, designate that. The the operator, the farmer, moves the vehicle to the field, and, and then you can get out and execute the task. I wanna come back to this because that's just, we we're seeing a lot of the visual videos of demonstrating the task working.
John Reid:But, when you really think about this, a lot of operations, like your planting or anything that has spring, anything that has materials and inputs that you have to manage, there's a lot of work besides just the execution of the planting or spraying task. You you have to consider, how do you resupply. And, actually, in some in some cases, the some some, there's a there's a robotics company that's looking at automating the, material logistics and moving materials to and fro, which seems like also a good idea and be really important for a fully autonomous system. So so where do these, examples, pay off? And I'll give a couple of examples for you.
John Reid:It tends to be on for for many of the applications where there's a lot of already labor involved, and, autonomy is a way of getting better performance output out of labor that could be low skilled and, display some of that. So one example in, there's a there's a study by the Western Growers, about a system called carbon robotics. It's not a it's not a autonomous system, but it's a very intelligent laser weed control system. Very expensive. It's about a million dollars just for the implement.
John Reid:But in those operations where you have, three crews of 25 people weeding in the field, this kind of system, has a payback and and can can provide value in that particular scenario. So, again, that's one scenario. So what's what's coming with, these technologies is that, as I said, I think it's just a long journey. We're seeing a lot of the initial things like we asked in the guidance questions. There are a few early adopters that are trying these technologies, and I think we're going to see moving through the hype as industry gets more experienced.
John Reid:We're gonna see more and more examples of this. It it is not going to be for everyone. In fact, I would say if you are interested in autonomy, the really, the the journey is still start with automation and, get the value of the productivity of automatic guidance and some of these other type of things. And, integrating into farm management information systems is kind of a next step. Autonomy will be more complex because it's like a a suite of technologies that integrate together.
John Reid:And, yes, the technology readiness is there. We're still working on the, viability and understanding the business the business model, and there is some customer value on certain types of applications in terms of, especially around labor productivity and performance.
Todd Gleason:John Reed is the director at the Center for Digital Agriculture on the Urbana Champaign campus, University of Illinois. That was a portion of an address he made to last week's All Day Ag Outlook at the Beef House in Covington, Indiana. If you'd like to hear all of it or more from the All Day Ag Outlook, you can find those presentations on our website. They're audio only at willag dot org. Look for the article name that includes the All Day Ag Outlook twenty twenty five.
Todd Gleason:Now also last week, Neil Dahlstrom joined us. He's the author of the book Tractor Wars. The documentary based on that book will air tonight on our companion station, WILL channel twelve, at 7PM. Be sure to tune in then. Neil was on hand last week for a book signing and talked just a little bit about the documentary and the book.
Neil Dahlstrom:If you don't wanna hear the story, close your ears. Just plug plug your ears. Right? Because I don't wanna give it away. But, basically, the book ends are nineteen o eight.
Neil Dahlstrom:This young up and coming car manufacturer named Henry Ford, who no one's ever heard of, sends a a a photo and a paragraph to a publication called the Farm Implement News and says, I'm building a farm tractor. And it's and it's gonna be out really soon. And so you imagine people, you know, opening up the Farm Implement News and reading it and going, yeah. Okay. I think I've heard of this word tractor before.
Neil Dahlstrom:I don't know who this Henry Ford dude is, but, like, okay. Big deal. Well, a month later, Henry Ford rolls something else out called the Model t, and all of a sudden, a lot of people have heard of Henry Ford. But he's a farm kid. That's kind of the beginning of this journey.
Neil Dahlstrom:The farm tractor industries, couple hundred machines from maybe six or seven manufacturers at that period in time. So that's kind of the starting point. The next important piece happens in nineteen o nine. Cyrus McCormick junior, the CEO of International Harvester, and William Butterworth, the CEO of John Deere have a meeting. Cyrus McCormick says, I heard that you're gonna get into the harvesting business.
Neil Dahlstrom:And if you do that, we're gonna go into the plow business. And William Butterworth says, no. We're not doing that. We'd never do that. But I heard that you're getting into the plow business.
Neil Dahlstrom:And if you do that, we're gonna go into the harvesting business. Of course, they're both doing this already behind the scenes. Right? So that kinda sets us up. International Harvester is 10 times the size of John Deere at the time.
Neil Dahlstrom:They're a hundred million dollar a year company, and this kind of triggers a lot of this what they're they're trying to build what they call a full line. So that's $19.00 9. Fast forward a little bit. The the farm tractor, not really widely adopted. We're talking about these big, what they call prairie tractors.
Neil Dahlstrom:They're sixty, seventy horsepower machines. They're in Canada. They're out west. In 1913, this company comes along called the Bull Tractor Company. And they do something amazing.
Neil Dahlstrom:They go, oh, the average farm size in The United States is 40 to 50 acres. Why don't we build a tractor that's suitable for the average sized farmer? This is what an editor called the gorgeous nightmare period, which is everything just went chaotic. Now every entrepreneur, every technology person, every ag, implement manufacturer decides they're getting into the tractor business. The bull sells a whopping 3,000 tractors in 1913.
Neil Dahlstrom:Five years later, they're bankrupt because it turns out building a tractor is really, really hard. Where's Henry Ford? Still trying to design a farm tractor because it turns out that building a farm tractor is really, really hard. Takes him all the way until 1918. John Deere starts R and D in 1912.
Neil Dahlstrom:They introduced their first farm tractor in 1918 and that's where this started with me. People would say, what took John Deere so long to get into the tractor business? And I would say, well, 1918 feels really early to me, and they were before the people who were after them, but they were after the people who were before them. That meant Neil doesn't know the answer, so he's gonna try to confuse you. That's what really started the research.
Neil Dahlstrom:So John Deere gets into the business. International Harvester is the big player. By 1925, there's a 60 tractor manufacturers in the in The United States. They're building 200,000 tractors a year. Henry Ford has 75% market share.
Neil Dahlstrom:He introduces the Ford Center in 1918. He's got 75 market share. The industry is evolving. We had things happen like a world war, a global pandemic, all of these things, all this context, which is really important, an ag recession, price wars in the early nineteen twenties. So there's a lot going on in this period.
Neil Dahlstrom:Henry Ford starts hemorrhaging market share in the automobile business and has to make a decision. So he goes from 75% market share in 1925 to almost nothing in 1928 because he withdraws from the tractor industry, and we start over. International Harvester is at the top again. Deere is number two. They're selling about 75 to 80% and everyone else is trying to figure it out.
Neil Dahlstrom:That's the entire book in about five minutes. Hopefully, we did okay there. You followed me. So that led to this great call I got about a year and a half ago from Iowa PBS, who's who, the one of one of their producers says, well, I got your book for Christmas. Have you ever thought about doing a documentary?
Neil Dahlstrom:And I said, no. Because I don't know how to do documentaries. But that kind of led down this road of producing this documentary with PBS that came out last year. And as of, I think, a day ago, two days ago, it's being released nationally. So hopefully everyone's gonna get to see this documentary, and I'm really excited about it.
Todd Gleason:If you'd like to watch the Tractor Wars documentary based on Neil Dostrom's book, You're in Luck. It airs tonight at 7PM on our companion station, WILL TV, channel 12. Up next, Donde of day weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming is here to take a look at the weather forecast.
Don Day:Very mild spring like conditions have been noted here over the last week over many areas of The US, and it will stay that way till the end of the week and the weekend when things change. We're gonna see a strong storm hit the California Coast early this week and then spread out into the Northern Plains by Friday and Saturday. We're gonna see a significant snow event for parts of Minnesota, the Eastern Side Of North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Northeast Nebraska. That area will see winter storm conditions. Very strong winds will develop across the Southern Plains, and then we're gonna see severe weather across the Mississippi Valley areas and parts of the Southeastern United States and maybe getting into the Eastern Corn Belt as strong thunderstorms will develop along that cold front.
Don Day:Now colder air behind that system will spread in this weekend and early next week, putting an end to the warmer temperatures, much colder temperatures in many areas of the Corn Belt by the weekend. Temperatures will then rebound early next week only to see another system arrive late next week. So the up and down pendulum swinging type patterns that you get this time of year look to be on tap as we go into the March.
Todd Gleason:Thank you much, Don. Don Day is with day weather in Cheyenne, Wyoming. You've been listening to the closing market report from Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world online at willag.org, w I l l a g 0 r g. Have a good afternoon.
Todd Gleason:I'm extensions, Todd Gleason.