 Welcome to this week's Agricultural Market Situation Outlook webinar, part of our ongoing webinar series. We've been running since COVID hit mid-March. Following the usual format, there'll actually just be three of us speaking this week. Myself, Dave Ripplinger, Brian Parman, our egg finance specialist and Tim Petrie, our livestock market specialist. Following the usual format where we'll have three presentations, in this case, followed by Q&A. You're welcome to ask questions using chat or the Q&A feature at any time, but we won't get to those until the end of the presentation. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Brian Parman. Hey, thanks, Dave. I'm going to adjust my camera a little bit so it doesn't cut off my hat, NDSU agriculture, but today I'm going to talk a little bit about, again, our unemployment situation, which continues to dominate some of the headlines, and rightfully so, as it's a big driver in the economy. I want to talk about national as well as North Dakota, some about our oil and tax revenue, and then I'm going to go into some of the egg finance and lending conditions that we're seeing in the Midwest that the Kansas City Federal Reserve has put together. So, my first slide just shows the typical graph that you guys have been seeing with the initial weekly jobless claims put together by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. And for the first time since we peaked in late March, early April, we've seen initial jobless claims increase. Now, compared to the numbers being filed, 100,000 person increase is not overly dramatic, but it does reverse a trend that we've seen now for several weeks and months in a row of these newly filed jobless claims continuing to decrease. Right now, if you look at the tail, it's actually increased a little bit for the first time in several months. So, we'll continue to monitor that situation, but it is showing that some businesses and some folks are being laid off, perhaps, that went back to work. And the next slide shows the continuous jobless claims, and that has continued to trend down a little bit. New jobs are being found at a higher rate than jobs are being lost, so these continuous claims keep going down. So, that's a good sign. That's definitely a good sign, although not trending down as fast as we would like, down approximately 1.2 million continuous jobless claims. And when you look at these graphs, by the way, that I'm showing, on long time horizons, you see the gray section and the white section, the white being to the left and the gray to the right. Gray indicates a recession. And so, as you look at this, the reason that part is gray is we are officially in a recession right now by the standards and metrics, whether that or set forth, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. So that's what they're looking at, and in order for us to get out of recession, we have to have some positive growth in a quarter to call the recession over, okay? So then my final slide there on the national numbers is the U.S. unemployment rate, which sits at 11.1 percent. A lot of, and it has continued downward since peaking there in April at close to 15. Now, it hasn't gone quite as high as some folks thought that it would, but the projections right now are an end of year unemployment rate around 9 percent, which would be around where it was during the great recession. So this would be, you know, three quarters of the year at double digit or close to double digit unemployment, which again is as bad as it was during the great recession. And hence this talk on Capitol Hill, Congress and the executive branch discussing a fourth round stimulus. Now what that's going to look like, there are claims all over the place. The House passed a, I think it was called the Heroes Act, which had a whole bunch of stuff in it. There's been talk that the Senate wants, and that was a $3 trillion bill, there's been talk that the Senate wants to keep it below $1 trillion. There's been talk of direct checks again or tax holidays, basically reducing the federal income tax rate. All kinds of things are on the table right now. And so we won't know for probably at least a few weeks exactly what it's going to look like. And my guess is if it is passed, it'll be passed in the 11th hour right before the House goes into recess. So stay tuned for that. But we are still in a pretty precarious situation as far as this goes, hence the discussion of another stimulus. Now I would guess that there's going to be an ag component to it as well. There wasn't the last one. I don't think that those who represent heavily ag business states are going to let something go through without a component in there for our producers and farmers around the country. But again, what it's going to look like remains to be seen. So my next slide looks at North Dakota specifically. And it fairly well mirrors the rest of the country. So continuous claims have trended down for the most part. That's the bar chart on the left. You can see they peaked there in late April, early May. And so far have been trending downwards. And then initial weekly claims, just like the U.S. as a whole, you see that bar on the far right is bigger than the last two or three, showing that initial claims this last week, the ending on Saturday, increased a little bit. And so we're kind of mirroring the country as far as that goes, though our overall unemployment rate is lower. And you can see that on the next slide. You look at June 2020, 6.1 percent compared to May 2020, 9.1 percent. And with the country around 11 percent is total. North Dakota is about, you know, a little over half that. So again, we're in a better place as far as unemployment goes than the rest of the country by a pretty good margin. And I think a lot of that's because of our ag sector really hasn't seen the big layoffs and problems that you see in the services sector, such as hospitality, food service, those kind of things. And then where we were this time last year, about 2.4 percent. So yeah, we're about a little more than double where we were last year. Nearly as bad off as the rest of the country and certainly improved since last month by, you know, reducing unemployment by 3 percent from 9 to 6.1 percent. So where are the hotspots for unemployment in our state? You look at this map here, you see a lot of it in oil country there in the west. McKinsey County, Stark County there at 9.5 percent, McKinsey at 9.4, Williams at 12.5 percent. And then up near the top in Rolec County, about 15.4 percent. They're the they're the high of the state. But for the most part, most most other counties in that three to six percent range sort of close to the state average that you see. So just kind of showing and a lot of that has to do, obviously, with the oil and gas companies there in the western part of the state with a lot of layoffs and issues going on there. Speaking of oil and gas revenues. Here's the state allocation, tax revenue allocations for oil and gas. And you can see April, if you look at the line graph on the bottom, you can see that April was about on projection so that black line is actual. And the dotted line was the projection from the legislature. And June 2020 is particularly bad way down. The table, the table at the top shows the forecast was for one hundred ninety seven million in June. The actual was thirty eight million. So if you look in the gray there on the left at the very bottom, thirty eight point five million for a difference of one hundred and fifty nine almost one hundred and sixty million dollars. So basically an eighty one percent decline from what was projected. So for right now, the biennium forecast was that we would have around two billion dollar or two point two billion dollars in oil revenue so far. We actually have two billion. So we're about nine percent behind where the projections were for the current budget. Now, I don't have the general fund chart yet. It wasn't completed by the time this presentation came about. So all I have is the oil and gas. So when I when I talk next in a couple of weeks, I'll go over the general fund. But for now, we can see the oil and gas revenues are considerably behind for the last couple of months or where the projections were putting us about nine percent below the four where we were forecast to be. OK, so I want to shift gears now to talking about ag lending and credit conditions. And these charts and a lot of this information, pretty much all of it is collected from the Kansas City Federal Reserve. They do a really good job putting together credit and lending conditions and reports such as this. And what this chart shows is the change in non real estate loans by purpose. OK, just like the title says. So if you look at the total 2020 is this gray bar. So the total on the left and 2020 is this gray bar. So total loans and billions of dollars in 2020 is way down from where it was in 2019. It was actually up in 2020. It's down nearly 15 percent. OK. So the percent change is the the the striped line there. So down almost 10 percent there. And then if you look at feeder livestock, OK, down their their loans down. The only one that's really staying the same as other livestock, operating 2020 loans down considerably, machinery and equipment and all other. So all the gray bars below zero. So we're seeing a lot less loans being issued to our producers this year relative to the last few years. OK. So my next slide then shows credit conditions for the first quarter. And if you look now, remember, the first quarter covid had not hit yet so much. I mean, it was very the tail end of the first quarter there in March, where, you know, the stuff hit the fan, so to speak. And the Minneapolis Federal Reserve is our district. OK. And so if you look in 2020, loan repayment rates actually had declined in in in our area before this even pandemic really hit the most. OK, so our area and a lot of that's going to be dairies. OK, because you've got Wisconsin and Minnesota who are included in in our district, North Dakota, and Montana and South Dakota as well. And so a lot of that is the dairies. But still, Minneapolis showing the largest decline in 2020 in farm loan repayment rates and then farm income in 2020. Minneapolis Federal Reserve, so our district, again, the lowest with Kansas City, not very far behind. And that's primarily crop and livestock production or farm income. I'm sorry, is on the right. So our farm income is is is quite a bit lower in the Kansas City as well as the Minneapolis area. So repayment rates down considerably, farm income down considerably and actually the amount of loans requested or the amount of loans granted down considerably. I shouldn't say the word requested because there are a lot of this has to do with the fact that some loans are being denied or they're being reduced. And that explains a lot of the reason that the actual loan loans being issued have declined. So my next slide shows delinquency rates for for the area. And if you look at the graph on the left, you can see delinquency rates have been rising for the last four years from 2016 in pretty much every category, both real estate and non real estate loans, the delinquency rates been increasing. Now, it's increasing from a really low number. OK, 2016 was around one percent, one to one and a half percent. But we still, you know, we've doubled that delinquency rate in the last four years. So it's not I wouldn't call it high yet, but it is concerning that it's starting to trend trend higher. And then total delinquency delinquent balances in the first quarter. If you look 90 days past due, excuse me, 2016 was the high and 2020, though, is considerably higher than any of the years with the exception of 2016. The gray bar there on the right graph showing 90 plus days past due. That's 2016. And then the brown bar to the right on the 90 days past due portion is 2020. So that's showing that, yes, there was quite a bit of stress going into this. And remember, again, this was from the first quarter. OK, this was before the pandemic hit. This was before we saw extremely low commodity prices, corn prices, soybean prices, everything else, basically crater at the beginning of the pandemic. The the other thing, though, to keep in mind is that the with the CARES Act that was passed, there is some assistance. And this is all going to go into incomes that farmers are going to use to pay any any bills or debts or anything like that. So that's going to help out a lot. But we'll see going forward just exactly how much. So speaking of the CARES Act and the Payment Protection Program, the Kansas City Fed basically looked at PPP loans reported in the first quarter for May and the share of ag total loan volume to farmers. Twenty two percent were PPP loans. OK, so that's a pretty big share. That's more than a fifth and less than a quarter. And the share of banks reporting these PPP loans were about nine to ten percent. OK, so most states received ag PPP loans, thirty nine total. And the average size was almost a hundred thousand dollars. OK, and the median was twenty six. So there was a lot of small PPP loans, but there was a lot of really big ones when the media when the average is that much higher than the median. That means there was some a few but really big loans dragging that average well above the median. So most loans were actually twenty six thousand dollars or or less or half the loans were twenty six thousand dollars or less. And most loans were probably not much more than that to keep the average that low. So finally, when we look at the CFAP, which was that portion of the CARES Act that went to ag, it was weighted quite a bit more heavily to livestock. So the percent of the dollars per head, if you look at live cattle, feeder cattle and then especially market hogs, about 30 percent of the revenues they generated were from would be from CFAP. If you look at crop, corn was more like 10 percent, soybeans down around seven and wheat closer to five. So this initial CFAP program was more heavily weighted and as Tim Petrie can attest, it had a huge impact on live cattle and feeder calf prices as well as hog prices, much more so as a percentage of their total value than they did on crops. I know a lot of crop farmers saw corn go down below at or below three dollars for spot prices, wheat went way down, soybeans went way down. But when you think about feeder cattle and live cattle, feeder calves were closer to one hundred and fifty five dollars, a hundred weight going down almost to a buck. I mean, that's that's a huge decline, you know, 30 percent or more on on on our livestock and hogs had it even worse. So that that's why it was weighted that way. That's why it turned out that way was the impacts that it had. And so this illustrates just how big of a percentage of CFAP was weighted toward livestock versus crops. Now, if there if and when there is another program, I have no idea what it's going to look like, but we'll see. And it'll probably be something like this where we get trickle, trickled in information and we won't know what's in it until it's actually published in past. And that's typically the way these things go. So with that, I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to Tim Petrie, our livestock economist. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. And I'm just going to follow up with some of the stuff that Brian talked about and not going to spend a lot. And I've got quite a number of slides and I'm going to spend a lot of time in each one. The main thing that I want to show you is how we compare till last year at this time because and I'm going to expand and talk about a number of market classes, not only cattle, but also hogs and lambs and some poultry and other things. Just to show you where we're at now, I could spend 20, 30 minutes on each slide, but instead I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes. And again, Brian gave a nice introduction into this. Start with slaughter steers, five market average here. And the red line is this year. And as he said, we did have a big impact on slaughter steer prices due to COVID. We were expecting prices to be very similar to the last couple of years. In fact, USD was predicting that and the futures were predicting that. But instead, as you can see there, we we've had quite a bit lower prices. In fact, on the right hand side of the chart on January 10th, the futures market there, you know, at 1.22 just showed that it was the futures market saying we're going to have the same prices. We had the last three years, as a matter of fact. And now the the Dease futures are ten dollars under that. And so, you know, right now, compared to last year, we're down 16, 17 dollars two weeks ago in the webinar. I told you that I thought that the bottom had been reached in Fed cattle. And indeed, that was true. We have increased a little bit the last couple of weeks. And that is good news. But it's still quite a ways to go to get back to last year. But, you know, the futures market again says we're going to have continued improvement throughout the year. In fact, get to August futures a little bit a tiny bit above what they were last year. But again, last year we had the Tyson fire we were dealing with. And so prices were lower than they then they might have been. So anyway, we'll see some recovery going on there. But as of now, it looks like due to the pandemic and so on, will be below last year. So go to the next slide. What probably more people are interested in in North Dakota in our area up here is calf prices. And again, as Brian said, we, you know, we were doing we were expecting a really good year for calf prices at the beginning of the year. All fundamentals were really, really good. We had record beef exports and record domestic demand. High stock market. We had fewer calves to we're going to sell this fall and just more on that kind of at the end, but of what the calf crop might look like. And but anyway, the pandemic hit. And as he said, as Brian said, prices crashed. But, you know, they've leveled out and and seasonally, you see the last three years, we were at 180 and we would have certainly been at 180 this year. We're already at 176 back there at the end of February. First of March. And so we had certainly been right up there at 180. And then in the fall, we would have been probably closer to that blue line, which is 2018. But, you know, just looking at where we are now, compared to last year, we're not that far, just a couple of dollars off from last year, which is, you know, a feet given fed cattle prices are 16 to 17 below. But of course, it's it's all due to corn. So which I'll talk about in a while here. But anyway, the big question is for this fall, what will I be? And again, that's kind of a loaded question. Earlier on, I was saying we can probably expect lower prices. But right now, several things indicated we, you know, maybe have similar prices to last year, which weren't that good. I I'll grant you that. But still better than they might have been given the pandemic. So go to the next slide. The reason why we have feeder calf prices similar to last year right now and why our expectation for this fall may be even given the lower fed cattle prices is on this chart here with corn. We'll call last year corn prices really, really spiked in the last month or so because of the thought that there would be a lot of less corn planted and so on. And then when the corn did get planted, they came back down. But you know, last year at this time in Omaha, I like to use Omaha corn price because that's where major feeding is and where our feeder cattle might go to be fed. We had 450 corn last year, 312 now. So we're almost a dollar 40 lower than we were last year. And again, USDA backed off their big almost 16 billion bushel. But there's still over 15 billion bushel corn crop for this fall. So that's put and definitely putting a lid on corn prices. And, you know, December futures there are, you know, at relatively low level. So that's helping the calf market and go to the next slide. Also is a big player in the in the heavier weight feeder cattle site. Here's the 750 to 800 pounders. And again, took a big hit right there early with the pandemic and again, some payments for those that sold there earlier in the year in the March time period. But we've, you know, since April, we've seen a gradual uptick and that's due to corn going down and, you know, corn was affected negatively by COVID as well. So we are still, you know, five to seven, eight dollars lower than we were last year at this time. But they were spiking last year at this time because corn all of a sudden was going down. Kind of interesting, if we look at fall, the fall futures are right up where they were last year. And in fact, we get to the November futures up there, 143 there, just slightly above last year. So the futures market now staying on these heavier weight yearly cattle will have basically the same prices that we had last year. And indeed, if fed cattle, if demand picks up and the pandemic doesn't get worse and exports continue, we could even do better on fed cattle than we first looked at in this chart. And that would even help us here. But this is all due to corn being low compared to last year that's putting us here. And so, again, the corn crop isn't in the bin. A lot of things can happen as we know last year, but so far the weather has been conducive. But again, with the pandemic, having prices similar to where they were last year in the fall, I think it is a feat. And let's go to the next slide. Just finish up, I've showed you this slide a couple of times. I think I showed it to you last time. So we'll dwell on it. But anyway, here's call call prices that are actually right now above the last couple of years. Again, they took a big hit there into April, but you know, it came back and always looked to fall. They were always declined there in October. So just kind of a signal for you, no reason to think that they wouldn't do that. You know, maybe it all depends on weather and drought and so on. And but we do have a smaller cow herd. So maybe not as big a calling this fall. And so that would help on price a little bit, but they always go down in the fall anyway. But as of now, here's one market class that's above last year. And for those of you in drought country that have had to move some cows a little bit earlier, at least one little saving grace, there is that they've been at better prices than the last couple years. So go to the next slide, just going to hit some of the other market classes here that I really haven't covered in the webinar very much. Here's base slaughter hog prices. And hog prices have taken the biggest hit of any of the livestock. And you know, at one time earlier in the year, but by the end of last year, we were thinking that hog prices would be good up there. And by that red average line 14 to 18 because of African swine fever and the reduction in pork production in Southeast Asia. But of course, that did not come to fruition, although we are exporting quite a bit there, but we've got record pork exports. And of course, the big backlog of hogs that we have, we're still trying to work through. Slaughter is getting up there 90 to 100 percent, but we've got a lot of hogs to work through. And so that's really affected that blue line cash market there. And futures aren't that optimistic. Those blue squares are the August, October and these futures. This remaining about where they are now. So not a lot of optimism there. But by next year, those green squares up there show the futures market for next year, getting back up to more average prices, what they've been. And that's with the idea that we will get the backlog out of the way. And the recent hogs and pigs reports showed indication that we're are slaughtering quite a few sows and that pork production by next year could fall off a little bit. And then again, the expectation of record exports. So go to the next slide. Obviously it's really affected the feeder cattle market. Normally feeder pigs are seasonally highest there in April, simply looking ahead because butcher hog prices are usually high in July. And so feeder pigs are high. But this year, of course, the pandemic completely set that upside down with butcher hog prices falling and feeder pig prices following along and still are at low levels because you saw those futures there at 50 bucks for macarcus weight for hogs for the rest of the year. And so feeder pig prices, unlike feeder, even though with low corn, like feeder cattle up near last year's prices, feeder pig prices are struggling. Go to the next slide, then talk a little bit about the lamb side. Next slide, are we hung up there? Dave, there we go. There we go, market lamb prices stayed high in March, maybe a little bit longer than some of the others because of the spring holidays that we have three important religious holidays. But after they were over, the market absolutely just crashed. But it's picked up some now. And these are Northern Plains prices are averaging right at 140, still below last year in the average. But we've seen improvement there and actually lamb has been moving pretty well in spite of being a relatively high-priced meat. And so moving in the right direction there. I'll go to the next slide, talk about feeder lambs. And this is a Colorado, Texas and South Dakota average. And but again, there we saw a big decline after the religious, some of the holidays and the COVID effect and so on. But we've seen an improvement here. A couple of things on this recent improvement in feeder lamb prices. Are there a lot of what's called feeder lamb prices now that go into the ethnic market as 60 to 80 pound lambs that are, although we would call them feeder lambs, really go into an ethnic demand there and have another religious holiday coming up here towards the end of July. And we don't have a lot of feeder lambs right now to sell, particularly up here in the Northern Plains or in the Inner Mountain State. They'll be more available as you see that normal seasonal low occurring there in September, October, November, when a lot of them hit. And so this little spike here is probably due more to the kind of short supplies and an ethnic demand here at the end of the month. But still, feeder lamb prices are above where they were last year. Go to the next slide then. Although, you know, we don't have a lot of broilers up here, but a competing meat to beef in the other commodities we have. Broiler prices again took a big hit, did come back, but it just been kind of evened out there. I think their, you know, broiler prices seasonally in the fall are usually come down from summer highs that we didn't hit this year. But, you know, the expectation are that we'll slow up a broiler production by the end of the year. So, you know, prices could come back up a little bit. But as of now, you know, they're relatively low. So go to the next slide. Milk prices, of course, really, really were hit extremely hard. We were expecting milk prices to be better this year and that green line. This is class one milk prices that I don't want to make a disclaimer. This isn't necessarily what's going to end up in the mail box price for farmers because it's a complicated issue and we have milk marketing orders and so on and transportation and so on. But we've seen a big advance in milk prices. This is class one, but also in the class three that they make cheese out of and so on. A big spike up here from June into July and so farmers are going to see better milk prices in July, even though this might over accentuate that a little bit. A couple, quite a few things going on with milk prices. One, milk production is usually historically high in Maine, it fell off, you know, because we had a surplus of milk there when all the schools and restaurants and everything closed down. So the co-ops were wanting producers to cut back and which happened and so milk production actually went down in Maine instead of being historically high. And what's really helped out here in the last month or so is a number of things. Government purchases is one of them. We have this farmers to families, food box distribution systems going on. In fact, we have one on Fargo going on this afternoon and I haven't been going to any of them but I have a neighbor that went and the last time is there. You've got two gallons of milk in a free food box and no income or anything requirements just show up. And so the government and several other government programs did buy a lot of dairy products and so that's helped things and actually cheese prices have moved up to record levels and also the cure for low prices is low prices. So when we had those low prices there after the COVID hit in the Maine and so on, our exports went up quite a bit because we do export to our closest neighbors of Canada and Mexico and extremely low prices kind of spurred those. In fact, we had a record dry skim milk exports back then too. So all those factors kind of together with the lower production and all those things kind of help milk price out. So farmers are gonna see better milk prices in July about where we expected them originally to be as a matter of fact. So go to the next slide, finish up here, two real important, one really, really important reports out due tomorrow. The USDA semiannual cattle inventory report out tomorrow at two o'clock our time. You know, the website is shown there also a cattle and feed report. Very important, these reports are because it'll help us find out what our backlog was as of July 1st at least. And then on the cattle inventory side, you know, have we continued to decrease the beef cow herd and has the drought had any impact there. The, this semiannual cattle inventory report is not as detailed as the January 1st report that we usually use as a guideline because we don't have state level data. This is just a US data, but it's still important to show us, you know, how many beef cows we do have the expectations are. We probably have about a percent less than we had last year. And then the big thing of course is the backlog expecting, you know, the steers and heifers over 500 pound category probably to be up possibly two to 3% or we'll have to see. So again, in two weeks at our next webinar, I'll summarize particular what the cattle inventory report showed and if anything, you know, highlights the cattle on feed. So with that, we'll turn it over to Dave. Thanks, Tim. Dave Ripplinger, Bioenergy Economic Specialist. Walking through some pretty straightforward stuff in terms of what's going on in the market, looking first at ethanol production, continuing to recover off of our lows in early April. You know, we are in the midst of the summer driving season and demand remains strong. Not what it typically is domestically, but strong and growing, looking forward to continue. Probably the biggest news in the last two weeks has been the increase in spot ethanol prices, which have finally made their way into the Dakotas, which are great following futures prices, which were here a little bit a few weeks ago and have pulled back a little bit. If we look across corn, ethanol, and the Stiller's grains, everything is really working in the refiner's favor, especially that increase in ethanol prices of being 70% higher than they were about a month ago. Looking at that simple crush, again, my rule of thumb typically is $1.50 is you're a pretty happy camper and we're at $2. I'd have to go back and look and see the last time that measure has been this high. Of course, it's a short run phenomenon, but if this was something that we'd expect you and continue for some time, we'd definitely expect more capacity to come online. And if it lasted or was expected to last a long period of time, we'd actually see new plants being built. This is most likely just kind of a temporary phenomenon with folks still getting back in line with where demand has returned to be. But again, good signs for the industry and good signs and kind of that support of production as we go forward. Related to that, just looking at days in storage, we're really back in that traditional range in between 20 and 30 days of ethanol and storage. Far below the 55, 56 it was in April. Had a bit of a uptick a week ago and then back down this week, really good signs for the industry kind of being in balance of where folks would like it to be. And again, that downward tick in relative storage is definitely supportive of prices. Again, just looking at that blend rate year over, you're not pulling the gasoline number specifically, but again, use is a bit high, which I guess is good. It's still, we'd expect that almost all of the ethanol being sold is still E10, but it's still there in the blend and got back off of those lows from before where we're really kind of actually just trying to work through the excess stocks. But again, this kind of a sign that the market is back to a new normal if it is, but some sort of balance or equilibrium in the ethanol market. I want to just look at relatively briefly, so this is biodiesel numbers. Biodiesel is really kind of a tough thing to report on because they have much more of a lag than ethanol does. The most recent numbers which just came out earlier this month are actually only through the end of April. And if you remember, April was kind of the worst month in terms of gasoline, diesel, and ethanol use. And then obviously also here biodiesel use. So we did see that downtick with that red line, that 2020 line that tells us a little bit about what's going on, but biodiesel is a really interesting animal driven. The dynamics are quite different than they are for ethanol. Again, there's no blend wall and biodiesel. And so it oftentimes becomes that idea of how inexpensive can biodiesel be because it can work itself into that blend at quite variable levels. And typically we see that blend rate at about 2% nationally, but it varies all over the place regionally. Again, just looking at the relative price of diesel and biodiesel in any particular market. So we saw that dip and then what's happened more recently is a little bit unknown. What we do know from the national oil, the crusher's NOPA is that the actual oil seed crush has declined month over month into June, but it's still a bit higher than it was a year ago. And again, there's a lot of things that go on, especially if you look back at 2018 and 2019, where if soybean crush is really dictating what's going on in the biodiesel market, we know that with the relationship or the activities with China and Chinese trade, that things are kind of all over the place that have really little to do with what's going on in the transportation fuel market, but although it does impact the biodiesel market to some extent. I'm just looking kind of at where use has been, the 2019 line, they're kind of sporadic but relatively constant. Again, it's important. I think we know this pretty well in agriculture. Diesel is what fuels industry, which fuels freight movement. Gasoline is primarily a consumer fuel for passenger travel. Diesel use is relatively constant while gasoline use is somewhat periodic with a lot more use in the summertime. We saw that really precipitous drop in March and April, nowhere near as severe as gasoline. So if you saw it was about a, maybe a 20, 25% drop while gasoline fell by half. Again, that was this expectation that things were still gonna have to move. Folks might not be going to work, but we're still gonna put groceries in the store. And bit of a recovery and things are relatively close to what we'd expect this time of year with a little bit of fluctuation and a little bit off last year's numbers. Some last notes have been really big news, especially nationally in the energy space. And that was a decision by US district court, which ordered DAPL or energy transfer partners, the folks who built and operate DAPL to drain the pipe because the environmental impact assessment that was expected to be done by the US Army Corps of Engineers had not been completed in a manner that was satisfactory to the court. So that was issued about two weeks ago. Definitely bad news. A few days later, the court of appeals, so the next rung up in the court hierarchy basically issued a stay saying, no, we're gonna allow DAPL to continue to operate at least for a couple more weeks as we allow folks to respond with some additional information. But I think all of us are really familiar with DAPL having lived through the protests and whatnot about four years ago. Looking at what's going on, right now it moves about a third of North Dakota's oil production, at least what it was before COVID. Half a million barrels per day. It was actually undergoing the permitting and planning process and the subscription process of doubling that. One of the secret blessings with this decision or with COVID is that since production has declined, there's not gonna be a huge squeeze or a lot of pressure put on barrels that are trying to get out of the state. If we were at full production, we would have a heck of a conundrum going on. And even though we do have rail capacity, if you move some oil by rail, a lot of that infrastructure simply isn't where it needs to be to move the amount of oil that we would have at full levels of production. Just a little bit of hip pocket information. So folks don't understand the context of what's going on with DAPL. In many respects, the US Army Corps of Engineers never did their full homework on DAPL. In some ways justified, if you're familiar with the actual pass. The DAPL, which is a petroleum, a crude oil pipeline is in the immediate vicinity within a few meters of an existing very large natural gas pipeline. Corps of Engineers, to do a full environmental impact assessment takes years. US Army Corps of Engineers said, hey, we'll gladly do it, it'll take years, but it wouldn't slow things down. Energy transfer partners wasn't really happy to hear that because there was oil that needed to be moved. So the ETP folks went ahead and built it while there were still some of these legal questions open. Now we've come to the point where the court has basically said, you know what? We need to know full and well what this means to the environment, as stressed especially by standing rock tribe. And that's kind of where we sit. NEPA in and of itself, if you didn't take a course in environmental policy, so NEPA is kind of the big rule that says, hey, if you're gonna do a big project that affects federal lands or federal property, you have to do a really big environmental impact assessment. Since the core controls the Missouri River, NEPA applies and there are certain things that have to be done. And according to the courts that, what was done, it just isn't sufficient. And that we're now in this situation where, depending on what the court decides that they're gonna be somewhat satisfied, will they allow DAPL to continue to operate before they make a final decision? That would be before the core might submit a full study which would be supportive of the project. And again, a really troubling piece of news. Again, especially long-term, looking at what DAPL meant to the North Dakota's oil industry in terms of reducing transportation costs to the refining infrastructure, it was tremendous. We saw basis change by five to $10 as soon as DAPL came on board. And also too, just in terms of safety, we've avoided some of the rail safety issues which has been helpful as well. But again, now it's essentially in the hands of the courts and we'll go a little bit in the upcoming weeks of what's gonna happen, but this leads to a lot of questions. And also what kind of returns to a bigger issue wrestling with for a long time is how much are folks interested in investing in energy projects gonna deal with before they say it's just not worth it? And clearly there's process and then that process was known beforehand, but the onus of dealing with the courts, because many of these projects are challenged in the courts, is that really worth pursuing depending on whatever the relative returns might be to the project outside of those court fees. So that's what I had and that concludes our presentation part of the webinar. Opened up for questions in just a second. Just to let you know, we do have three scheduled webinars left this summer every other week until Labor Day, so on August 6th, August 20th and September 3rd. At the same time and at the same URL that you visited today. I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Again, you can use the chat feature and Brian just sent a similar invite. Also that Q and A feature, we can use that as well to field questions. If you have any questions otherwise, you can invite us, not just outside of this. Also know that a copy of the PowerPoint as well as a recording of this webinar will be available at these two websites, hopefully within a few hours and for sure within a day or two. If you want to see again what we talked about today or anything we might've talked about in previous editions. As questions are not coming up, I was wondering if the panel has had any comments or thoughts that kind of came to mind after they spoke. Yeah, this is Tim, I think forgot to say when I was talking about the upcoming cattle inventory report. But another real important thing we wanna find out is this is USD's first estimate of our calf crop for this year. And so it'll be interesting to see we were expecting a lower calves this fall because we had fewer on January 1st, fewer beef cows. But this will be a first good indication of how many calves and likely how many fewer calves we'll have to sell this fall, which is gonna be important for prices as well. So that's my comment there. Yeah, I've got a question for Brian because I know you follow politics a bit. The unemployment kicker ends this week. And obviously folks are in Washington now trying to decide what they wanna do. What are your expectations in terms of them passing a bill in the next 48 hours to do something? Zero? Zero, zero in the next 48 hours. Like I said at the beginning, I really think that this will be something that's pushed till right before recess, which is next month. There's been talk of basically keeping that unemployment kicker on there. Some of it, there's some wild claims of not only in keeping it, but increasing it. But then there's other claims of going from $600 down to 450 and I've heard $300 because there's people who make the case that, and it's true, that in some cases that $600 actually makes staying unemployed more profitable than the job they had in the first place. And I think I did the math on that North Dakota and it was something like, if you make less than 20 bucks an hour, you were better off on unemployment than you were actually working. So now there's a discussion of an additional bonus, weekly bonus for a while, if you go back to work. So you go back to work and you collect this government bonus for actually going back to work. So there's talk of that. What exactly they're going to agree to? Boy, if I knew that I would be a genius because I don't think even the people voting on it know what's eventually going to be negotiated down. One side who has pet projects and concerns in one area is gonna make grandiose claims for that. The other side is gonna make big claims that they want this and likely it's gonna be some combination of both down the road. So it is a big deal though. I mean, that was a lot of money that people were, I've been showing the tens of millions of people unemployed and that $600 a week goes a long ways. You take away 600 bucks a week, that's a lot of spending that isn't going to happen. The folks are gonna shell up if they don't have it. So we've basically put a band-aid on it with some of these programs and like you said, Dave, they're set to run out here very soon. And when they do, that's going to have a massive impact on the economy in general. So I think there's an appetite. I would say this, every side, whether it's the executive, the Senate, the House have all said we need to pass another stimulus. So the odds of us getting one are pretty good. However, what it's going to look like at the end of the day, that is what remains to be seen and what the price tag is going to be. The president said two trillion, the House has said three trillion, the Senate said one trillion. That's a pretty wide range. The last one was, I think around two, not counting the one before that. So what a $1 trillion one looks like versus a two is pretty big, especially when it comes to ag. I mean, if you got a $2 trillion bill, it's not so hard to sneak $30 billion of ag aid into it. If you got a $1 trillion bill, people get a lot less, I don't know, willing to let something like that slide because they start looking at these line items a lot more closely. So that's going to be a big factor in it. And the one last thing I wanted to talk about, it was the same thing that Tim and Dave and I were talking about before this, is what's going to happen with the college football season and meat demand. I mean, I know a lot of people on here are fans. A lot of folks on here have been to tailgating parties. I've been to tailgating parties at the University of Nebraska, at Kansas State, at Mississippi State, at North Dakota State. They're all the same, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people grilling a lot of meat. And if they're, and if they ban tailgating, well, then people might do it at home, but if they just get rid of the games altogether, there's really no reason to actually do it anymore. And then you think about, so, and then the amount of ribs and wings and briskets and those kinds of things that are all consumed during that period, I've been thinking that, we may try to come out with something to try to project what that impact might actually be on the livestock and then the follow-through crops market that would go along with it. So, we saw this huge impact in the spring when the restaurants basically shut down. And then we had stalls at the packing plants. Well, what happens if we, that was a lot of that was supply side problems. And what happens if we have a big demand side problem? And that would be, because when you look at the data, July, August meat consumption per capita stays pretty consistent all the way into late fall. And then the dead of winter, it goes down pretty remarkably. Is college football, is sports propping that up and making it seem more like July than it would be? I mean, who wants to go grill in November if you're not grilling for a football game with your friends? Anyway, it's just something to think about going forward that some of these discussions, canceling football and those kind of things might have real consequences for us in the ag community going forward. And we might have to come up with some ideas on how we're gonna work around that. I know that was long winded comment, but it's been on my mind now for the last week as a big call. The only thing I'd say about the next stimulus bill is I remember when a billion dollars was a lot of money. You remember the last farm bill in 2014, it was like six billion or something? I was like the biggest farm bill of all time. Then MFP just blew them out of the water. And then the CARES Act CFAP blew that out of the water. So I wouldn't be surprised if it's 50 billion this time. I mean, I don't know. We throw around billions and trillions now like it's no big deal. So I anticipate that there will be some representatives in Congress and in the Senate who are looking for assistance to farmers in any bill that comes up in the future. I would bet a lot of money that that's the case. What it looks like, who knows? But it'll probably be there. Sounds good. Well, if there's no more comments, it looks like there was no questions today. We were that thorough. I wanna wish you everybody a great week and we'll see that first part of August on the sixth. Thanks.