 Alright, so my first slide here, as folks are probably well aware, over 85% of all Americans right now are under some sort of stay-at-home order. There's really only five states in the entire U.S. that do not have some kind of municipal or statewide stay-at-home order going on, and we actually happen to be one of them. The others are South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas, and that's at this moment, and that can change at any moment. North Dakota went that direction, and the colors in peach here do not have a statewide stay-at-home order, but all their major municipalities, for instance, in Texas, Dallas, Houston, Austin, et cetera, they all have some kind of stay-at-home order, so the vast majority of the population in those states are under a stay-at-home order, and that is having a dramatic effect on the economy as we know. So you look at what I got going on here with my next slide, and what you'll see next slide is that unemployment has actually been, I think we're not moving on. There we go. Okay, you've probably seen the headlines, but last week we had 3.28, as you'll recall, 3.28 million people for the week ending March 21st file for unemployment. That was almost four times the highest amount ever in 1982. We're about 900,000 people, I adjusted for population growth because it was actually 695, but if you compare it to today's population, that would have had to be about 900,000. And last week was a new record many times over at 3.28 million. So then yesterday's report comes out, and there were on the high end people saying maybe four million, maybe five million, the industry consensus was about three and a half, and lo and behold, we had 6.64 million new people apply for unemployment. So in the last two weeks, that's been 10 million people who've applied, and you may or may not have heard that a lot of states, their websites are crashing, they're having problems getting through days and days and days to finally reach somebody on the phone. These state unemployment offices are just absolutely overwhelmed. So there's a backlog of filers right now, and we just don't know how many. So the outlook going forward is pretty grim as far as that goes. Now, the month unemployment report came out today, but it ended about the first two weeks of March. So when all heck broke loose after that report, the data for that report actually came out, and pretty much everyone is dismissed as not very useful because of the things that have transpired afterwards. So my next slide, I want to talk about key Federal Reserve actions, okay, and they've taken a lot of different actions, and we don't have time today to discuss them all, but the big ones are, and the ones that are going to impact us, the consumer, and us, and ag the most. First of all, the rate cut. So the feds have cut rates for overnight borrowing to nearly zero percent, between zero and a quarter of a percent. So what that boils down to is banks can borrow money from the Federal Reserve at almost no interest. That really basically enhances what's called the required reserve ratio. They can have more money on hand alone out because they can borrow it and have that in reserves. Then there's quantitative ease and QE. We remember that from 2008, and essentially that's large scale purchase of various bonds such as treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, and this coming in here is important because what we saw happen, yes, the fed cuts rates, but that doesn't necessarily mean that consumer lending rates are going to decline, okay? Because we've heard about the crowding out effect. Some people may remember that from school or whatever or just in hearing it, and what can happen is if the U.S. Treasury is issuing a whole bunch of treasury securities and bonds or whatever the case may be, interest rates or yields have to go up for corporate borrowing. Well, if the Fed comes in and buys these treasuries and buys these mortgage-backed securities up, then there's fewer of them on the market, demand may be strong for them, and the yield winds up going down. Now the discount window, this is where banks borrow money. It's usually one day or just really overnight. Now they can borrow for 90 days. So the banks can have this increase in cash that they can loan out and don't have to worry about paying it back in the morning. And then of course, term asset-backed securities loan facility. This is the feds buying auto loans and credit card loans and student loans and SBA loans, all to keep, all to encourage banks to lend as the cash will be available and to keep rates on those lower, all right? And then finally, this corporate paper and corporate credit actions. This is so that very large companies can borrow money at a lower rate than what they would have had to borrow otherwise with, again, going back to that crowding out. So on my next slide, I kind of show how that's having an impact. And you'll recall from one of my earlier talks that, yes, interest rates, the spread between the 10-year T-note and corporate bonds, BAA, investment-grade bonds had gone way up. So now this last week, the Fed coming in and buying investment-grade corporate bonds, that rate has started to come down some. So it spiked up really quick with the influx of debt that's about to hit the market, the Fed comes in and starts buying up that debt and it starts reducing that spread between the 10-year T-note and corporate bonds. All right, so my next slide, this is what the effect that it was having on commercial-like mortgage rates. So the 5-1 arm, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and the 15-year fixed. Again, we saw a spike, okay? Mortgage-backed securities causing a spike in the interest-grade on mortgages. The Fed comes in and starts buying these mortgage-backed securities and starts taking action. And in the last week or so, we've started to see these rates come down again. So that's what I'm trying to say, those are some of the key actions taking that's going to affect the main street consumer and ag just like us is the unintended consequence of the government issuing all this debt and issuing all these treasury, because as you know, Ron's going to talk about it here in a minute, that $2.2 trillion. I won't call it a stimulus, but recovery package. Well, somebody has to buy that debt. And if it's all the private sector, then that drives rates up. But the Fed's coming in and buying them as a mechanism to keep those rates lower. Now, the next thing I want to talk about real quick is income and substitution, and this is kind of leading into what Dr. Olson and Tim Petrie are going to talk about. And that shift in food consumption, okay? I just said that 10 more million people wound up unemployed in the last two weeks, and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. That's to add to the 5.8 million already unemployed. And we call something like that an income shot, okay? So as high unemployment for some, low consumer confidence for others, so people who may have lost their job or not lost their job, I should say. They still have some income, but maybe they're pretty worried. And they're not really encouraged, they're going to spend as little as possible in the event that something winds up happening. So they substitute their choices in the short run and maybe even the intermediate run for lower cost calories, okay? So when we think about people on their food budget, it's a calorie game. And how many calories, how much nutrients can I get for my buck? And my next slide is a nice little table kind of showing this. And if you look at the top, flour, okay? The dollars per calorie of flour, you get for $1 a flour, you get 4,464 calories. So that is two days worth of calories for a dollar out of flour. You can go down the list here, ramen noodles, plain oats, all these different food groups, and what you notice is a lot of them are what? They're coming from small grains like wheat, oats, and barley, and these kind of things, you get a lot of calories for your dollar. We go down the list, whole milk, less calories per dollar, bagels less calories per dollar. And then we can look at plant-based proteins that have a lot of calories per dollar, such as pennil beans, okay, and lentils. And then we have eggs, 802 calories per dollar. And then we get down here into the meats. And these are the cheapest meats you can basically get in a calories per dollar phase. And I didn't put steaks or anything else up there because they're extremely high, but 72% lean, 27% fat ground beef. That's only 439 calories per dollar and a decent amount of protein. But when compared to these others, it's a lot more expensive. So if they are gonna buy meats, if they are gonna buy animal-based proteins, it's gonna come from probably the cheapest source, which is gonna be fatty ground beef, breakfast sausages, eggs, poultry, pork, these other kind of things. So that may be a lot of what folks are seeing and what they're expecting going forward, okay? So on to my final slide, I wanna talk just a bit about recovery. There's been some projections out there from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Morgan Stanley projecting a 30 to 40% contraction in quarter number two, a smaller contraction in quarter number one, cuz it was just the final two weeks of the quarter that really hit hard. And by definition, two quarters of negative growth is defined as a recession. Now that can be any amount of negative growth, 0.1% all the way up to 50% for two quarters. But the projections for the second quarter are not pretty. They're more looking like a 25, 35% contraction in the second quarter. And that starts to lean more towards a depression than a recession, a drop that large, it takes a lot of growth to come out of that. So essentially the four different recovery methods and the fourth one I kind of put together myself. We've got some who are talking about the rapid recovery, okay? So we get through the second quarter of large contraction. And then in the third and fourth quarters, the economy booms. This assumes that a lot of the businesses that are in trouble right now and needing loans and infusions of cash remain in operation. Most people get their vast majority people get their jobs back and away we go and by January 1, 2021, we're back to where we were. So the second scenario that some have talked about is basically a second spike. We get the, and again, in a lot of these situations, just like with a hurricane, everybody's a meteorologist. Well, during a pandemic, everybody's a virologist or epidemiologist or something. I admit that I am not. So I'm just taking my cues from the experts in that field. But see this growth pattern, okay, we come out of it. Then we have a drop. We have this fall spike in infection rates and so forth. Maybe we don't have lockdowns, but people get scared. Spending habits again do not increase like they would have. And so we have a double dip, okay? So we recede again. And then finally, we come out of it maybe next year sometime. The one that a lot of folks are afraid of is number three. That's the slow recovery, okay? So we dropped fairly rapidly and we don't have this big spike. It's just this long, perhaps multi-year growth path. The people who lost their jobs, the businesses that went out of business, they don't come back. A lot of them don't come back. Not the original business. For instance, if you got a viable restaurant on the street corner that was making money, maybe that business, that particular owner doesn't come back. But in a year from now, it's under new management. Somebody buys it, it becomes viable again. But again, that takes months, maybe years to eventually occur. I tend to be of the mind that number four is going to be the most likely path forward, assuming we don't have a double dip. If we can get things under control, if we don't have this massive double dip in the fall, we have this big contraction that happens, okay? The last two quarters, we get a quick increase, okay? With the business that remained viable, that were able to stick it out through this pandemic. Yeah, but then not all of them come back, okay? A lot of them struggle and just basically call it quits. And so we have this longer term, slower growth path to get back to where we were. So we have this pretty quick increase, and then things tend to taper off. And it takes us several quarters, maybe years to get back to the size of GDP, the size of the economy that we had in the past. As some businesses are lost, many of them are retained. But most businesses, a lot of businesses are wind up lost. And we have some intermediate and longer term unemployment that stays somewhat sticky for a while. But again, a lot of it's going to depend on exactly what happens with the virus and the pandemic and how long states are in shutdown. A lot of them are being extended. We're making guesses on the economy and we're doing the best we can on that. But a lot of it depends on the health crisis going on. And that is not something that we're all experts in. So we're all kind of watching that going forward. But this is right now the situation and some of the scenarios that we see moving into the future. And with that, I believe I'll be turning it over to Ron Hogan. Okay, good afternoon, getting my mic set right here. My first slide shows talking about the CARES Act. We've probably all known about this in the media, the $1,200 per person, 2400 per couple, 500 per child, phasing out after 75,000. Last time, Brian talked about the unemployment benefits, an extra 600 a week. And then states adjust that based on their state unemployment rules. Student loans, I wanted to touch on. There's a waiver of two months of payments that you don't have to pay. And then it extends the first repayment to September 30th. All these things are fluid, trying to dig this stuff out of that. That $2.2 trillion package is tough. And that's the way it stands at this point. There was a rule change on retirement accounts. That the normal 10% penalty for early withdrawal was waived. And they are allowing you to withdraw up to $100,000 for a corona virus related requirement. I don't know, maybe a lot of people don't have much left in their retirement account after the stock market crash. But those are some things that were in the act. My next slide, I'm going to talk about small business loans. And this is a big deal. Still just kind of digging into the information to get it out to you just to make you aware of it. And there'll be more details coming down the pipe. It is retroactive for expenses from February 15th through June 30th. And you can get a small business loan for the maximum of the lesser, the maximum loan you can get is the lesser of 2.5 times the average monthly payroll costs, or $10 million, okay? And the government will guarantee these, they're called 7A loans to 100% through the end of the year. Now you can use this loan to pay payroll, healthcare benefits, mortgage, interest, rent, utility, and the interest on other debts, even if you took on those obligations before February 15th. I don't know what happened to my slide there. There we go. The terms of the loans are 10-year maximum and the maximum interest rate at 4%. It waives the bower and lender fees and the banks will get reimbursement for that. Now all this information is going out to the banks and it will be administered not through the SBA, but through banks. There is 349 billion appropriated. I'm not sure how long that will last. But normally now agriculture, farmers do not qualify for SBA loans. But it's nothing really in the act that says they don't. So we're waiting for guidance on that if farmers qualify for them or not. Now my next slide is important because it talks about the forgiveness of the small business loans. Now banks are should be getting this information this week. And the banks need to be on the SBA list. I guess there's a list of banks that handle SBA loans. And for businesses that want one of these loans, they need to go to a bank that's on the list. And typically they probably go to their normal lender. Or if not, find a lender that is. And what happens is you're eligible for forgiveness eight weeks for up. You can be forgiven for an eight week period after the loan origination. And there's also some stipulations of course you need to act in good faith. Well, I'm assuming you do that for any loan you get. You do not require any collateral. And forgiveness will be prorated based on the percentage of employees reduced compared to last year. So what it is, it's trying to help you keep your employees employed. So if you've laid off people and you don't have as many employees as you did a year ago, your forgiveness will not be 100% if it will be prorated. But if you hire some of those people back, if you get this loan, re-hire some of those people by June 30th, you will not be penalized for that. Of course you have to have all the payroll documentation to do this. And the banks, they do have 60 days to act on this. And that's what I know about the small business loans at this point, and hopefully we'll get more information in the future. The last thing I was going to talk about was some income tax changes that they threw into the package. We probably all heard that the tax day has changed to July 15th from April 15th. They did put a charitable contribution deduction of $300 of what they call above the line, you don't need to itemize to take that. And they did also change the net operating loss carryback rules. And I think this is important because more than likely some of these businesses that if they survive without going bankrupt will have a net operating loss. And back when the tax cut bill was passed two years ago, they changed the carryback rules that businesses could not carry back a loss. They could only carry it forward. Only farmers could carry it back two years. They changed it now so that all businesses can carry back five years. So if a business did generate a net operating loss, that they are allowed to carry it back and maybe they can get a refund of some taxes paid. So that would probably hopefully help their cash flow. There was some limitations on carrybacks. I know for farmers they could only carry back 80% of the loss. But they removed those limitations completely for 2020. For large firms, there was a limit on interest deductibility. They raised that from 30 to 50%. Now, there's also a deferral of payroll tax deposits. And that includes your SC tax. Now we're still waiting for more information on that. I don't know if it's just the employee match or if it's the employer part. But there is definitely a deferral. And it's actually deferred until 2021 or even 2022, the way it looks. But we're waiting for more information on this as well. But just to make you aware of that, that these are some things that are in the package and we wanted to make you aware of that. And we'll let you know as soon as we know things. So next, I guess Tim is up. Well, Frayn, I guess. All right, good afternoon everybody. This is Frayn Olson. I'm the crop economist and marketing specialist with NDSU Extension. Coming live from the spare bedroom at my house. So we're all trying to make the best out of some very unusual conditions and situations here. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about the prospective plantings report and some of the implications that might have as we move forward into the next cropping year. Up until this point, I know I've been trying to get farmers to be cautious about shifting acres. Given this report, we've seen some minor adjustments in the marketplace. I guess I'd like to talk about that. So if you look at the table on the top row, and that was the average trade estimate, the pre-report estimate of the traders before the report came out. So the traders in the marketplace were expecting about a 94 million acre corn plantings, about 85 million acre soybeans, and about 45 million acres of all wheat. And again, of that about 12.7 was spring wheat and about almost 31 million acres of winter wheat. I also provided kind of a high end of the range and the low end of the range from what the private analysts were suggesting. The row in red is what the prospective plantings report actually said. Now, before I go any further, I wanna make sure everybody understands these are, this is not a USDA forecast. This is actual USDA survey numbers from farmers. So across the entire USDA surveyed 79,983 farmers to try and get these numbers. So they tried to have a pretty broad coverage. They broke it down to make sure that they have a minimum number of farmers in each state to make sure that each state is represented well also. So again, when we look at about a 97 million acre survey number versus about a 94 million acre pre-trade estimate, that was a little bit of a shock to the marketplace. We were not expecting that large an increase in potential corn acreage. On the flip side, the average trade gwest was about 85 million acres for soybeans. The report came out and said about 83 and a half. On the wheat side, when we look at all wheat as well as winter wheat and spring wheat came out very, very close to what the trade is expecting. So again, when we look at what these numbers mean this year versus what we had last year on the very bottom of that table on the row highlighted in blue, that was the actual planted acreage in 2019. And again, notice on soybeans, we had a pretty significant drop in soybean plantings last year just because of the wet conditions and all the prevent plant that went on. So if we look at last year as kind of a reference point saying about 90 million acres it was what we planted for all corn last year and a forecast this year of 97 million, that's again a pretty substantial increase. I did also put on the very bottom kind of highlighted in green what we did in 2018. And the reason I did that was primarily for soybeans. Again, the 2019 number for soybeans was a little bit skewed just because we did have such a wet spring and the large percent per event planting numbers. So again, we're looking at a shift into corn and out of soybeans. Now on the next slide, I looked at the information for just North Dakota. And again, in North Dakota there were 3,177 farmers that were surveyed in North Dakota to come up with these averages. On the far right hand column is the perspective planning numbers for 2020. So that was a survey results we got out on Tuesday. I also included what happened in 2018 as well as 2019 for reference. I've highlighted the three major crops, the three big crops we have in the state. Corn at the forecast right now, the expectation is that we'll have 3.2 million acres planted corn versus 3.5 from last year. For spring wheat, 6.1 million acres this year versus 6.7 million acres last year. And then the soybean, which to me was kind of a surprising number an increase to 6.6 million acres or basically a rebound from 5.6 million acres last year. Now I've had several interviews, several people ask and call or email asking, well, what happens if, what might have caused this? And I think this is a combination of two things. Number one, kind of the price relationship we saw in the markets as farmers are putting their budgets together and trying to decide what to do. The price relative prices we saw for these crops when the surveys were taken and as farmers were putting their budgets together but also kind of the expectation for kind of a struggle this spring, depending upon how the spring plays out, potential for some prevent plant acres, the fact that we have some unharvested corn that still remains in the field and the concerns about getting that harvested in time to be able to come back and actually replant the next year's crop. So I do think that some of these numbers do reflect all of that information. And again, as we move forward as we get more information about what spring planting and spring planting progress might be as well as now we've seen a slight shift in the relative prices for crops. We might see some minor adjustments not only nationally but also here in North Dakota. The next slide includes some of the what I call small market crops, some of these crops that are not quite as large in acreage but are also very important from the economic standpoint within the state. I did highlight dry edible beans because I've been getting a lot of questions about dry edible beans and potential increase in acreage. Based on the survey, it looks like about 650,000 acres versus 615,000 acres last year. Again, when we look at relative prices, the pinnale bean, navy bean and black bean prices are pretty strong compared to some of the other things we're seeing in the marketplace right now. And again, coming back to some of Brian's comments earlier that as people change their consuming habits, their buying habits, they're eating more meals in home rather than eating them in a restaurant. They're changing their, at least temporarily changing their habits. This is having an impact on short term on both the dry edible bean as well. We're starting to see a little bit of an uptick now in the lentil market as well. This increase in dry edible beans, I do think will be limited, mainly because of seed availability. On the next slide, I wanna talk a little bit nationally about what is the market signaling to us? And again, people have talked about this corn-soybean ratio or the relationship between corn prices and soybean prices. So what I have listed here is the November 2020 soybean contract out of the futures market in Chicago. I have the December corn contract. And that's on the top. So on the right hand side, the black line is the futures market for soybeans. The blue line is the futures market for corn going back into June of last year. And then on the bottom, I have a line we're looking at that soybean corn ratio. So you take the soybean price divided by the corn price. And I've drawn in three different lines there. The blue line is a 2.5. Below that is a red line at 2.4. And above that is a red line at 2.6. So these are kind of the standard numbers that we use in the marketplace to try and say, well, is the market trying to provide an incentive for corn or incentive for beans or are we relatively neutral? So 2.5, that ratio of 2.5, again, soybean divided by corn, is considered to be neutral. When you look at the crop budgets and relative profitability, that seems to be kind of a neutral balance. By the time we get down to a ratio of 2.4 or less, provides a very strong incentive to start planting more corn. In fact, in fact, the budgets for corn on corn in the primary growing regions actually work better than soybeans. If you increase to or change that ratio to something closer to 2.6 or even above a 2.6, very strong incentive to try and increase soybean plantings relative to corn. So if you look at the time period and when this survey was taken in the beginning to middle of March, that ratio, that corn-soybean ratio was about a 2.35, almost down to a 2.3 at times. So when the survey was taken, the market was signaling, we want more corn, we need to back off the soybean acreage. Well, notice now what's happened in the last few days. That ratio has come back to more of a neutral position. So the marketplace may have over signaled a little bit on the side of corn and planting is more additional corn. And I think they're rebalancing now saying, no, we don't need quite that many corn acres. In particular, I think because of concerns about the ethanol demand, at which I know Dave Ripplinger will talk about in a minute. If you go to the next slide, I do something similar with the relationship between springweed and corn. This is something that I have developed and been watching over the last several years. What I found is that a ratio of about a 1.5 is kind of a neutral. If you do the budgeting and you look at relative profitability, a price ratio between springweed and corn of about 1.5 is kind of neutral. If it gets above that, there's an incentive to plant some more springweed. If it's below that, there's more of an incentive to plant corn and corn acres. And again, when we go back and look historically, look back at when the surveys were taken for farmers and we look at that time period early to mid-March, the ratio was down at about a 1.4, which again provides a pretty strong economic incentive to plant corn and back off the springweed. Now, since then, and we have these big corn numbers come in nationally, I think there's some additional concern that the market may have overestimated or over signaled the corn acreage. We're now getting back into something that's a bit more neutral, a 1.54. I would consider kind of a neutral to a slight incentive to plant springweed. So as we move forward, I guess the bottom line, what I'm trying to explain to everybody is that we do need to watch what's going on. I think there'll be some flexibility that farmers will have as we move into spring's work. But again, my recommendation was not to use the coronavirus and all the concerns about what was happening as a reason for trying to make any dramatic changes or shifts in your cropping pattern. So watch what's going on in the marketplace. It's trying to send you a signal, pay attention to relative prices, kind of those price relationships, as well as what the absolute prices are. So again, to make some adjustments in your planting intentions, I think is reasonable, but I wouldn't try and chase the market based on what's going on with the coronavirus right now. So with that, I'll hand things over to Dave or to Tim, excuse me. Okay, good afternoon, everybody. One of you hosts have to start my video, it says, because you stopped it. So I'll get going here while you start my picture. I really don't need it. Everybody is asking, well, Ron talked to you about the CARES Act, but he didn't mention the egg part of the CARES Act. And so what I'm gonna talk about a little bit is all the livestock producers are asking me how much am I gonna get from that 9.5 billion dollars? And the short answer to that is that no one knows. USDA has a monumental task ahead of them to try to distribute it, but I'll just tell you a little bit about what I do know. It does cover all livestock, so that includes all the livestock groups. I'm not gonna, I can't go through them all, but it's cattle, sheep, hogs, dairy. You've seen the pictures on the media about milk being dipped and dumped and so on, and poultry plus fruit and vegetable producers and all direct markets and so on. So there are many, many, many producer groups that are needing money and 9.5 billion may sound like a lot, but when you look at all those different groups, it isn't. And so USDA, like I said, has a monumental task. They are asking for help from producer groups and they're gonna have to do a rule-making process and I assume then they will take recommendations at that time. And so now all of the state and national livestock and produce commodity groups are working very diligently to send recommendations to USDA so they can decide what to do in the rule-making process. And obviously everybody wants a big slice of the 9.5 million, which is kind of a small pie. So here in North Dakota, Senator Hoven today had a meeting with the commodity groups in Bismarck and that includes the other, the crop groups as well that their money will come out of a different pot out of the CCC. And so he's trying to get an idea to forward that on to USDA as well. So anyway, my recommendation is you have comments or ideas or recommendations. Check with your appropriate commodity group and let them know and work with them and we will keep you informed. My first slide here to go into some of the content. Brian talked to you about the economy and how it's tubed and Ron mentioned the crashing stock market. And so I just have the June live cattle futures market here, which is in the black, the high low and closes there. And then the solid green line is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is a proxy for the stock market. And so if you'll go back to February 12th, the stock market was record high at 29.551 and it had been going up and up and up for several years and the economy was booming. And unemployment was going down and everything was just rosy, all-time record high on the stock market there on February 12th. And since that time you see it absolutely crashed down to the 1900s and it has came back. I don't know when I looked earlier today it was at about 21,000. But anyway, you see there's a 95% correlation there since February 12th of the June live cattle and the Dow Jones Industrial Average just showing you how important the economy is to the livestock market, particularly the cattle market. And we just had all this extreme volatility. Today alone, in June live cattle, we have a $4.50 limit can go up or down over the previous day's close. And the last time I looked, it was nearing that about $8 range in prices today was at the beginning of the day it was up almost to limb $4. So I thought maybe there's a little good news there. And then a crash showed just a lot of volatility there. So moving into my next slide then what people are wondering is how bad is it? And so here is just a 20 year chart of feeder cattle futures the nearby feeder cattle futures. And so, you know, you can see on that chart that we are at for sure yearly contract lows. And again, it's the same thing we've had the limit on the feeder cattle futures is an expanded limit today because it was a limit down yesterday. And so the expanded limit is 6.25. And so again, we've had a $10 more range the last I looked on the feeder cattle futures that's just today. But more importantly here, I'm just showing you where we were at, where we're at. And so there, you know, where we're trading today we need to go back to 2011 levels. And so, you know, to find any support there. And so yeah, we've really, really declined and really, really a tough market that I've been talking about. The other people kind of mentioned but if this is your first time on here, I, you know, this is the third time and let's go to the next slide then here and you know, last two weeks and then today I've been showing you this chart the chart on the left then was last week. And so I just brought the new chart to the right just to show you kind of the dramatic impact that we've had these are 750 to 800 pound feeder cattle North Dakota which is probably the most we have right now for a market class left to sell I know a lot of background cattle themselves but talked to livestock producer group last night and still have some to sell. And so the red line on the solid line on both charts is just the cash market. And so comparing the two charts you see last week the market had responded a little bit to the Dow going up and to all the meat going off the shelves and the bear shelves and so on. So there was a response there and then the red squares are the futures market. So you see the futures market last week compared to how, you know, it's went down and the dark red line on the right hand side chart is our current chart. And the cash market fell about $15 this week for 750 to eight weight steers and I'll show you the market report in a minute and then futures also about $15 down. So absolutely a disastrous week and for those of you that still have background of cattle left to sell again, it's at just at a disastrous level but it's, you know, the way Brian talks with that macro and all those issues it probably even go over next week. So if you're holding out for, you know hoping for some improvement in probably in the next month or more more of what Brian talked about a lot of time it just is not gonna be there. So just got a disastrous situation. There are no good marketing strategies to use and you're really only strategy is a financial one talking to your banker and seeing what you can do there. So moving to the next slide is just kind of the same thing here. This is the market report for North Dakota markets and only two market reports available this week from Kists and Mandan and from Napoleon where the only two reported because of the volume basis. But there you see, I won't go through all these and you can look at this, this is being recorded so if you want to and these by the way are on my website that you have earlier if you want to look at the market reports for an individual markets or whatever. But you see last week highlighted there 750 to eight weight steers last week averaged one little over 138 and down to 122 78 this week. And so a decline there, like I said before a $15 and so that's very significant about 120 bucks ahead down in one week and again just an absolutely disastrous situation and the lightweight calves too went down not as much the 550s went down about I guess around $13 but still just a terrible decline in the market and goes back to all those things that Brian talked about. So move on, one of the problems we have too is we've got record meat production we've got record beef production as you can see on the left record pork production I don't have the chicken slide on here but we've got record chicken production so we've got record production and going into the year back prior to the February 12th all the fundamentals looked so good I this was a headwind with all this meat production but it didn't look like it was a problem because again a record high stock market the economy was moving or just moving and we had settled all the trade agreements with our major trading partners for all the meat and with the African swine fever and the deficit of meat particularly over in Southeast Asia and so on it looked like we would have record exports beef and pork and so on and so we would be able to get through this production with no problem and of course that all went south on us February 12th too with the coronavirus and it's hitting the world too so that's gonna affect exports and then our domestic economy just absolutely the tubes is gonna affect the man there so we've got a lot, a lot of meat to sell in a much more limited market so that's one of the things that's causing the terrible prices and also the volatility because trying to guess ahead of what's going to happen so move along to the next slide just kinda to show you some of the things that Brian talked about but bring it back to beef for instance on the left hand side is wholesale boneless this is 90% lean cow beef and there's a big demand for hamburger I think last week they said the amount of hamburger or at least in the last two weeks that moved through retail stores was double what it was last year and so you see on the whole of sale boneless prices are up kinda back to average they were depressed a little bit last year because we had a huge slaughter of cows both dairy cows and beef cows and so on but that market is just looking at the last couple of weeks has bounced back up because of the big demand for hamburger but go to the right hand chart these are tenderlings and usually there's a steady market throughout the year you can see the dotted line was last year and the red line the longer term five year 2014 to 18 average but they're just right at $10 there until the end of the year comes and then we have the big holiday demand for tenderlings from Thanksgiving through Christmas and then they come down but you see the big decline in tenderlings since the coronavirus simply because they go through the food service, the restaurant sectors where they're all sold and very difficult to sell them at the retail level so tenderlings are going down and hamburgers are going up so go to the last slide here I think that I'm gonna talk about I haven't talked about the other commodities much and they're being affected as well and probably every week I might bring in a different one but this you can see on slaughter lamb prices all the way to there and this maybe isn't all due to the coronavirus because there's some seasonality here the peak demand for lamb is right before Eastern Easter is kind of early this year and the buying for it to get it into both retail stores and the lamb market is even more dependent on the white tablecloth restaurant business than even the beef industry is and it's the East Coast and West Coast on top of where all the problems are and so that entered in too but everything all those factors going together along with a few packing path problems see that the slaughter lamb prices have declined as well as the other commodities so next we're gonna get into another very volatile market on the energy side and talk David Ripplinger is gonna visit me. Great, thanks Tim. Dave Ripplinger, Bioproducts Bioenergy Economic Specialist with NDSU Extension. Probably the best analogy for what's going on in the energy market including ethanol is we have a number of parties who are getting signals to slow down and they're not because of the COVID-19 situation we've seen a dramatic decline in gasoline and ethanol use at the retail level for consumers and that's led to and with the expectations lower prices unfortunately what hasn't happened is we haven't seen an adequate decline in gas or ethanol production refining and going back even further going further upstream we see that there really there has been no change in US oil production and simply what's gonna happen is because we're not making these changes fast enough that there's gonna be pretty tough times ahead in the upcoming weeks with the expectation that we'll likely or possibly run out of storage for fuel and for oil which will lead to a significant disruption in the marketplace across all of these products because we haven't seen a slowdown in oil production, gasoline and ethanol refining we've seen a dramatic increase in stocks and for the next few slides I'll kind of look at some of these in the individual markets more at hand. This slide shows oil production and use on the oil side we call it crude oil input it's input into a refinery and if we look at that green line which is that crude oil input you can see that in the last week that we've seen a dramatic decline in the input that's going into the refinery but not enough essentially we had the same production last week as we've had the last few weeks at 13 million barrels of oil per day which is near record and that isn't show signs of slowing down although with low oil prices Bach and WTI across the board we still haven't seen a slowdown in production and we're seeing a number of rigs starting to come offline and there's discussion of shutting in some wells but that's staying relatively flat and so you see that decline in the blue line and so that's going to obviously translate into a slight decrease in diesel and gasoline production so on the next slide on the next slide we'll just be talking a little bit about stocks and so clearly we see this build up the blue line is crude oil stocks we saw a build up of it also happened to be 13 million barrels for the week which is a substantial amount if you look at that orange line in the last few years we've only had a few other weeks where we've had that much of a build up but again it's not necessarily not enough and it's going to continue to increase especially in the near term and on my next slide finally moving on to the ethanol point of view we'll talk about input again this is essentially ethanol moving from that refined that the corn ethanol refinery to a blender to a rack to be put in the supply chain you can see that dramatic decline in input so in essentially use you look at production above it it's still substantially higher and so we're not seeing that cut in production commensurate with what's being pushed down the supply chain and that's a problem the result is you look at the purple line as we have an increase in stocks and right now we have record stocks of ethanol at a time where we're having a dramatic decrease in use and again the analogy essentially is you have this freight train that needs to slow down it's getting the red signals telling it that it needs to stop and across the board certainly not just ethanol but gasoline and oil as well we're just not slowing down quick enough and that's just going to cause more harm using looking specifically ethanol we'll continue to see these stocks build I fully expect that ethanol use will continue to decline for the month of April production will decline but not fast enough and those stocks will dramatically build right now we have not only a record amount of stocks but commensurate with that an extremely large amount of days of ethanol and storage which is not good and eventually for these markets to reach any sort of equilibrium we've got to deal with those issues and it doesn't seem like we're gonna be getting there anytime soon and then my last slide is just to look a little bit about things that Frayn talked about with prospective plannings and the large amount of corn that's not going to be used for ethanol this next year so just looking at 2019 the bold numbers are bushels used either for ethanol or for other uses so last year this marketing year we're looking at about 5.4 billion bushels of corn about a third of the crop being used for ethanol and the remainder for other uses including storage for the next year moving to 2020 if we actually realize this 9.97 million acres of corn production and had an average national yield of 180 bushels per acre we would see this huge increase in production and now if we think about we're gonna have a 25% reduction in ethanol use we see this gap increase tremendously so if we see a 25% reduction in corn ethanol production and corn use we'll be down to about four billion gallons of corn for ethanol and if we see that increase as what came from prospective plannings and close to trend line yield we'll have 13.5 billion bushels of corn that need to find a different home which is far above what we've ever seen and again about a 50% increase over what we had for this marketing year so just again kind of revisiting some things where we're talking about this pushing and affecting other markets this corn ethanol issue is really significant not just for corn but for all of agriculture here in the United States. Thank you very much guys. Where to the point now where we can go with a little Q&A and that would be just using the chat feature please and we have one question already just as a reminder too that we have some feedback we're looking for it's got three quick questions and there's also more recording information on the screen. One of the questions was some businesses are reducing employees salaries by 20% why 20% and not 10, 25 or 30% Yeah, I'll take a stab at that. You know 10% a lot of times has to do with sometimes restructures or businesses that are going through maybe a tough stretch I've seen 10% reductions in general contractors like right after the 2008, 2009 financial crisis as they attempt to save some money especially if they're a labor intensive industry where a 10% cut makes a huge difference to the bottom line I think right now with the uncertainty that's surrounding things they're looking at more like a 20% cut to conserve money and when you start talking about a 30% cut something above that and first of all people like round numbers they're not gonna do a 9% or an 18 or a 22 they're gonna pick a nice round number likely divisible by 10 but when you start getting into 30% well now you're talking more about a furlough or something to that nature because cutting wages by 30% the psychological impact of things like that it probably prevents that so once you start getting to cutting wages that much you're probably entering into furloughs and layoffs rather than pay cuts so I think 20% being obviously well above 10 has to do with the uncertainty that's going on the financial strain that they're facing and if we find businesses thinking that they need to cut it by 30% or even more it's probably more likely they're gonna go to a furlough or a layoff program than actually cutting wages by that much House price response to economic decline House price response, okay so going into this before the pandemic actually happened the home prices and new construction was actually looking really strong and new home starts, new housing starts and new mortgage applications and stuff it's kind of has a lag a pretty deep lag to it kind of like the monthly unemployment numbers now we have seen some a huge uptick in new mortgage applications but the vast majority of them well over 80% as from what I've seen are in refinances rather than new purchases and in the last few weeks the application rate for new purchases has declined pretty dramatically as you would expect during periods of great uncertainty a lot of folks aren't willing to in a position to take on a new mortgage or upgrade or anything like that so they kind of wind up in a wait and see I think that this is probably going to have at least a hold even or probably a depressing value on home values this year as people have a hard time possibly getting it sold not saying that you won't be able to sell your house I don't think the market's gonna be extremely hot right now as folks aren't willing to take on new debt now there is a price range that homes typically sell pretty easily and that's that 150 to $250,000 range and there's a simple reason for that and that is the fact that that's what most people can afford a lot of people fall into that I can afford 150 to $200,000 home but you start getting into these 300, 350 and 400,000 especially in areas like North Dakota and maybe Minnesota and Nebraska where I'm from I don't think those are gonna move very well but the 150 to 250s maybe but then again you have the problem with people being laid off and let go who fall into that 150 to $250,000 affordability range so yes, I think this is gonna have a pretty strong negative impact on home values and new mortgage applications into the spring Rain, this is directed to you how are grain exports to China Southeast Asia going? Is international trade and commodities slowing because countries are shutting down due to COVID? Okay, so we did get a weekly, on a weekly basis we get export sales reports from USDA we got one last week and again there's always kind of a weak lag so as of a week and a half ago exports had slowed down although this morning there was an announcement that China came in and bought 150,000 tons of US corn that's nine cargoes, nine vessels worth of corn so I do think the Chinese government in particular the state owned buying agencies are looking at these price levels and thinking this is a pretty good opportunity to come in and buy some US commodities now that we've had this retracement so we're not seeing a real strong demand base I think there's a lot of the international buyers are caught just like many of the domestic buyers right now a bit concerned about what the future would look like what kind of inventories do we want it to carry going into these kinds of economic times now there were a couple also reports that came out India and this is something that I'm watching fairly closely for the pulse market the Indian government came out and said that they were going to start increasing their state owned reserves to try and build an additional buffer just in case that there were some kind of supply disruptions that there was some shipping problems for their imports so they are looking at trying to build some inventories again we've talked a little bit about the port disruptions or potential for port disruptions down in South America and again there's always a little bit of a battle going on between the labor and the port facilities on making sure those vessels get loaded in time so it's been very sporadic it's been kind of hit and miss there are some folks who are looking opportunistically to try and buy inventories they're in a position where they feel like they can do that but this is going to be a very unsettled time I think it's going to be very very difficult to try and forecast exports at these levels there are some buying going on but it's not as fluid it's not as structured as we'd like it again the buying that I've seen so far is really trying to build inventories in case there's a problem so demand base is coming out of this COVID-19 pandemic globally is going to be a real challenge for some countries because they're really really taken hit in some parts of the world and there's another question how much can markets recover by harvest if the pandemic subsides mid-May, mid-June? Any news on MFP 3.0 due to COVID-19? Okay, let me start with the second one first and then I'll back into the price recovery so there is some money and I think Ron hinted at it a little bit there is some additional money in this last emulus package for supplemental payments to farmers and I know Tim talked about it a little bit on the livestock side we don't know a lot of the details of that one of the things we do know is that will not be an MFP payment because MFP was really defined and identified as something for a compensation for the trade disruptions and if everybody remembers back the balance of products kind of the payments that were made by commodity were very heavily weighted towards soybeans corn got very very small payments and I know that caused the corn council and corn growers some heartburn. In this case because this is more about the virus this is more about the general economic downturn the indication I'm getting at least informally right now is that it will not be a formal MFP payment like they had been structured before so we're looking at a slightly different program we obviously don't know the details and again as I think it was Tim was saying Senator Hoffman is having some meetings with the commodity organizations to talk about ways that we might be able to come up with an equitable way of trying to distribute this across commodities. When it comes back to how much can we recover by harvest I wanna point back to some of the things that Brian pointed out on the recovery the economic recovery. I think we can get a little bit of a rebound this summer especially as we get into the summer months I'm not gonna be overly optimistic on what those price levels might be I am a bit concerned about a second bounce of as we get into the fall where this COVID-19 the cases starts to rebound a little bit I in my view I think more of a W type of recovery is possible and again the commodity markets will follow something similar to that. I know in one of my previous discussions I talked a little bit about kind of those upper price bounds one of the I can in my mind one of the top end targets for new crop soybeans is about nine bucks on the futures $9 on the futures it's gonna be very difficult for the soybean market to rebound and push through those levels given what we know right now and I guess I'm looking at something like a 390 on the December corn futures is one of those targets that's gonna be very difficult we might get close to that but it's gonna be difficult to push through that level let me just pull up really quick the September wheat I guess I'm looking at probably a 560 or a 565 on the September wheat futures as kind of that upper bound that we may have that's gonna cause the futures market to stall out so I think we can get some price recovery given hopefully some better economic term conditions but I am really concerned right now we're not gonna see a lot of a bounce Tim a question for you what's what are your thoughts on the meat industry supply of cattle hogs and poultry has got killed capacity maxed out if plants shut down for one of multiple reasons what's going to happen to butcher ready animals? Yeah absolutely we're very very worried about that and there is gonna be disruptions there already is the cattle planted really GBS plant some employees are refusing to come to work and we've got a poultry plant just closed down this week in Pennsylvania and in problems with some other poultry plants Mississippi, Georgia, the Smith field hog plant in Sioux City or is still going but they've had some so very very much of a concern you saw my chart there we're doing record beef pork and poultry production record numbers of hogs we're running a full capacity our slaughter our Saturday slaughter kills of cattle hogs have been up so it's gonna happen and that's just gonna accentuate the problem because we saw last summer with just one beef plant closing down what that did to the market so that's just gonna be another reason why we're gonna be not much hope for any recovery on livestock because as it hits the packing plants and we back up livestock and so on so absolutely not a good situation. So Tim, any chance the cattle guys could get some of the funds that went to the CCC? Yeah, that's another good question that I can't answer the livestock groups did not participate in MFD and so they have been lobbying from that 9.5 was set aside for them and the produce people because they didn't get money before and so I'm not sure there's anything in the CCC that says it couldn't be by one of the things that will be discussed and the other thing is if this money doesn't go around I mean we're already two trillion and you know package and so will there be more coming down the pike and depends on how things get but you know there certainly may be go to livestock the MFP that was out before on a CCC did go to hog and dairy producers and so you know it may be a possibility but I am not positive on the answer. Is there an update on WIP plus programs signup deadline and it'd be done online with FSA offices closed? I can answer that one. I don't believe the FSA offices are closed but you can do business by email and phone they don't want anybody coming into the offices the WIP plus program the signup has started so you can go ahead and get involved in that if you want I just call them they'll give you all the instructions on how to do it online. Thanks for just waiting to see if there's anyone else that has any more questions. And while we're waiting I just want to remind everyone that we're doing these every week at Friday at 12 30 p.m. There's a lot of things going on and a lot of updates that you know things are changing by the day let alone the week so we're trying to keep things current by doing this weekly and if you have any things that you want covered that we're failing to cover right now shoot us an email to whom it may concern and we'll see if we can get to it. It's a good point even though it's good Friday next Friday this is still going on. Is an oil question? Are Saudi Arabia and Russia talking or they more focused on COVID than oil prices? No they are talking there was a conversation between Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States and there's a tentative agreement to reduce production because of the glut of oil in the market which is one of the primary drivers driving down price. The market responded very positively yesterday and again today yesterday it was up about 25%. It's up another $2 today. So that's a nice signal. The challenge is like many of these promises is how do they do folks actually follow through? And right now for April will probably be as much as 25 to 30% long every day on oil production about 30 million barrels a day which is basically as much oil as the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia produce together. Longer term and even before any of this hit we knew that there was too much oil in the market. In a month or so will probably be 13 million barrels a day long and if you think about that that would be the three parties reducing production by a third which is still a tremendous amount of oil. And so yes they are talking. There's been good news from that. The administration took an active role in facilitating those conversations which really needed to happen at the same time. We'll see what they do and even if they were able to reduce production dramatically we still have a lot of issues in terms of again that freight train just going too fast for the time being but it's a very good question and we'll know a lot more. Again one of the challenges with the oil markets is we have a leg and so we don't know. I won't know till next Wednesday what really happened this week and folks are not necessarily moving as fast as we'd like them to with the prices are indicating for them to do and then we also have a leg in data which makes it tough to have a firm control of what's going on which is difficult in a time like this where there's already a lot of uncertainty. Is the U.S. likely to support to domestic oil companies? There have been a lot of oil layoffs here in Williams and Mackenzie counties the past two weeks. Yeah so that's a great question. I actually had my last bullet point before I took it off and then sent it in was actually I mean the oil companies, the ethanol refineries. All businesses are in Washington right now trying to figure out a way that they can survive or take advantage of existing support and stimulus or lay the groundwork for future support. We'll see how that takes place. Whiting oil which is one of the larger players here in North Dakota in the Bakken declared bankruptcy earlier this week. That was not a surprise. They were in a precarious situation even before COVID-19. In terms of what's gonna happen in North Dakota, even regardless of if there is intervention by the federal government to assist the oil industry, there's too much oil and the folks who are gonna give first are is U.S. shale and the Bakken. And so it's really bad news that last week I had Bakken prices. Earlier this week they were down below $10 for the first time in the last 20 years plus. It's now back up to $16. Below $10 is you'd be shutting in wells. At $16 a lot of folks are still gonna pump but the numbers aren't good. And in terms of new development, the current price is far below what they need to continue developing new wells. That number which I also had last week if you wanna go back and just check out that part of the webinar, their number that they need to profitably put in a new well is $50 and we're at $16. For them to profitably operate an existing well is about half that's about $28 and we're at $16. And so the outlook for domestic oil is not good and for the Bakken for the oil industry in the state it's very bad. And just to put things in context that this is what's on the table is substantially worse than what we've seen in the state in the last five years. What we have and what we expect for the next few years is worse than what we saw 15, 16, 17. David, what could we expect for a low in diesel fuel? Oh, I don't know. There's an interesting phenomenon that's going on in the refining business and the fuel business is right now we've seen a dramatic reduction in gasoline use which is primarily passenger fuel. While diesel use has been relatively stable again because we use that for industry, for transportation, for freight. And so there's this push with every barrel that goes into the refinery. You can only get so much diesel or gasoline out of it. The ratios are relatively fixed. So every barrel that comes in, they're making something that the market still wants in diesel and something they really don't want is in gasoline. And so at the refinery level, the price of gasoline is actually negative. How is this actually gonna play out in the near term in terms of diesel prices specifically? I don't know. But right now there is some demand. The other thing we spoke about last week too is the margins that exist in the fuel business. Right now they're very, very large. And the question is, is something gonna give in order to sell more fuel? The truth is there isn't really a price of gasoline for me where I'm gonna go run to the gas station and fill up because I have nowhere to go. With diesel prices, I don't see a significant decline. And right now, again, we're seeing a rebound. I was just looking at the gasoline benchmark. It's up substantially over the last two days like oil is, I'm positive that diesel's the same. And so we might have, we may have already hit at least a wholesale low for diesel fuel in the United States. Depending on what might happen if we do hit that storage ceiling, in that case, all bets are off. We have more of a comment than a question says oil traffic has dropped off and pads that were being set up for all rig work has stopped. And that the sites are vacant. Happened quickly over the last two weeks here and done. Yeah, and what I'd say to you is we've actually seen, if you look at the official numbers, we're only down a few rigs in the state. And actually we're reducing rigs at a slower rate than the pervine is down in Texas. But I mean, that's the exact thing we're gonna expect. And right now we're just under 50 rigs, in a few months, it'll be, it might be a dozen. Yeah, another comment about fewer trucks on highway two around Williston last few weeks, still some moving around, but a lot fewer than before. All right, I think we've run out of questions, which is good. Nice long one today, people. I wanna thank you for participating and you can always check the feedback link and we have three questions on there. Just really love to hear from you. I'm next Friday, same time, and we'll be ready. Okay. Let's go.