 Well, I think we'll go ahead and get started. My name's Dave Ripplinger. I'm an economist with NDSU Extension. Joining me are the Extension Specialists from NDSU AgriBusiness. We're kicking off or rekindling a webinar series on agricultural markets that we started with COVID, took a little break, and now we're gonna come back monthly, and so this is gonna be the first of monthly webinar series that might last for quite some time, and it'll be scheduled for the Thursday after the WASDE release, which is a market release, the data that USDA has, and so we'll be having these scheduled regularly. We do have a webpage that you can check out to see those dates too. We're gonna save questions until the end, although you are welcome to use the Q&A tool to ask questions, as well as the chat if you'd prefer to do that, but we'll field those questions at the end of the webinar and we'll do our best to get to all of them. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Brian Harman. Hey, thanks, Dave, and you guys can hear me all right still I assume everything's going good. So I'm going to talk in this presentation a bit about some reports that came out from the Kansas City Federal Reserve in the last few weeks, basically talking about lending conditions within their region as well as nationally and some within our region, which is the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, but the Kansas City Federal Reserve collects a lot of data, puts out these excellent reports on ag lending, credit conditions, they do some stuff with land values, and those are free to the public if you just Google search KC Fed agricultural reports they pop up and down at the bottom of this intro slide that you're seeing, I'm giving credit to the authors of these two reports there that from which a lot of these charts come, so I wanna make sure I highlight that. But yeah, so I thought about titling this presentation real quick, what a difference a few months make or six months makes because there was a lot of doom and gloom headed into the summer and rightfully so, obviously based on what market prices were doing and the pandemic was doing to the rest of the economy and trade worries and just all kinds of stuff. And here we are today and some of this, a lot of this talk is gonna illustrate that for ag 2020 has not been a bad year at all. And here you see my first slide, this first chart from the KC Fed. And this is total farm debt at commercial banks third quarter and you look at 2020 at ag banks, total farm debt is down just over 8% and not non-ag banks up 2% but total farm debt at commercial banks at ag banks is down 8%. So basically what this is showing you is a bunch of people this year in 2020 we're not taking on additional debt or going into debt further. Whereas the last few years, especially 2015 and beyond that every year, year over year there had been an increase in debt. So the next slide I'm looking, what I'm trying to show there is farm loan demand. Okay, and you can see that loan demand is down. Okay, so folks just weren't taking out as many loans or going into debt any further or financing stuff nearly as much this year as they had in the past in the Dallas Fed which is Texas that area, they've been down for a while but for the rest of us, including Minneapolis which is us the gray line. They, we're down below 100. So it's an index that the way to read these is anything below 100 is decreasing and anything above 100 is increasing and you can think of it as a percentage if you like but pretty much across the board around the country at the major ag feds, loan demand is down. Folks are just not wanting to borrow as much money and putting as much stress on the banks. So my next slide though, shows non-performing farm loans at commercial banks and that despite all that, it continues to trend up in pretty much all both major categories which is real estate, non real estate, non real estate being like operating loans or well, obviously anything equipment loans, anything not involving real estate and then land loans being your farmland purchases. They've been trending up since 2015 but one thing to keep in mind while this looks pretty dramatic, it's starting from a very low number in 2015. You know, it was down less than almost less than 1%. So while it has almost doubled, we're doubling from a really low number. So non-performing loans remains to not really be a problem especially when you think about after the farm finance or the financial crisis of 0809, non-performing loans was up closer to two and a half approaching 3% and we're still not even to 2% yet. So while it is increasing and it's something to watch, so far still really not much of a problem and it doesn't look like it will be in the foreseeable future. So my next slide shows non-performing farm loans at ag banks versus non-ag banks, ag banks being the solid lines and non-ag banks being the dotted lines. And if you look at the dotted lines, obviously when the financial crisis happened, that's the big hump in the middle with those dotted lines. That was all the people, how home foreclosures and things like that. Yes, it affected agriculture but not a lot and in the subsequent years, I mean, it was down pretty low. So as far as non-performing loans went, agriculture over the last several years has remained fairly low and the last time it was even close to a couple of percent was several years ago. So it is up, it is higher, but again, it's starting from a pretty low number. All right, my next slide though, that's showing just agricultural credit conditions and some of those charts I understand are pretty small but for the most, the one on the left shows farm income versus loan repayment rates. Okay, and so the Minneapolis Fed, our Fed are the bars in the middle. Okay, so farm income was expected to be a bit lower in 2020 according to the Minneapolis Fed while the loan repayment rates are down as well. And then if you look at the availability of funds, you can expect if farm loan demand is down, then the availability of funds would likely be higher because if fewer people are supplying demand, right? If fewer people are demanding loans, then the available funds, there's more of them to go around for everyone else and that's just what this is showing here. All right, so my next slide, this is farm income projections and I wanted to put this in here because it's interesting. All right, so the slide on the left is they're both from the USDA. The one on the left shows the projection for 2020 farm income back in February. If you look down at the very bottom of the chart says data as of February 5th, 2020. And the projection was that 2019 would have been much better than 2020. 2020 was going to be much like 17 or 18 which were pretty poor years, not the worst since 2016, 2016 being the worst in a long time, but pretty bad. And then if you look at the one on the right, that 134 billion, okay? That is the, and then if you look at a net farm income and then net cash income, okay? Both of them projected to be extremely high in 2020. And a lot of that has to do with better commodity prices obviously, but also the CFAT payments which are included in net income and net cash income. And net cash income might be the story there where it was projected to just be 96.7 billion all the way up to almost 120. So over a 20%, would that be 21, 22, almost 23% increase versus what they were expecting before. And that's a very significant, very big increase. So when you look at this, the USDA is sitting there projecting that 2020 is going to almost be as good a year as 2014, maybe not quite, but approaching those numbers. So that's some good news. Good news for people in the equipment business. Good news for people who might have been struggling to pay off operating loans in the past. It looks like 2020 is going to be a year where that's not nearly as much of a problem, especially not as much of a problem as we thought it might be way back in March and April, which seems like ancient history. But I remember we were all talking about calf prices and crop prices being basically in the basement. Now in this fall, that hasn't been the case and you add that with CFAP and all in all 2020, overall is looking like a fairly strong year. Now my next slide comes from FAPRI out of the University of Missouri and they do projections for net farm income. And here is, I've shown this chart before, but 2020, you look across the top, you got 2018, 2019, 2020, you come down there, 98.6 billion dollars. The USDA is projecting even more than that, but it's still significantly higher than 2019 and then definitely higher than 2018. But if you look at 2021, it's as low as back in 2018. And a lot of that is because they're not projecting a CFAP in 2021. It doesn't, something like a CFAP, doesn't mean it won't happen only that it's hard to project or make statements that yes, which then another ad hoc payment is going to happen because you just don't know. They require politicians to act and they may or may not, we don't know that now. And then my final slide here is the projections for balance sheets though. So while this cash income and net farm income stuff is looking promising, 2020, they still project the debt to asset ratio to worsen a little bit, not much from 13.6% to 13.9% and FAPRI is basically just projecting that, and for the most part, it doesn't have as much to do with total assets as it does to do with real estate debt, okay? If you look at 2020, 2019 to 2020, total assets are projected to increase, okay? But real estate debts also projected to increase and it's supposed to increase more as well as it's supposed to increase more than total assets increase as a percentage. So you get this higher debt to asset ratio. And that is essentially, they're looking at it to continue that this real estate debt number is going to just increase year over year over year, somewhat worsening this debt to asset ratio. So essentially saying that they don't think land values are likely to come down and maybe move up at an inflationary pace and this debt to asset ratio approaching 15% in five, in about five years. But still we're starting from a fairly low number. So all in all though, we won't have the numbers, the official numbers for 2020 until well into 2021 because of how marketing years work and everything else and everybody closing out their balance sheets for the year. But right now, as we look back on it from an ag perspective, even though there were a few months there where all of us were pretty nervous, I think we're gonna come out of it looking back on it saying that between the CFAP and the better prices and obviously Fran can talk about why that's the case. We're gonna look back on 2020 is a pretty solid year overall for not only the nation, but North Dakota and everyone else. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our next presenter who I believe is Dr. Olson. So thanks a lot. All right, thank you, Brian. My task today is to try and give you a brief update on not only the USDA, WASDE report that came out at about 11 o'clock today, but also some of the underlying factors that are really impacting the marketplace right now. So I'll start out. My first slide is the pre-report industry estimate. So let's compare what was the trade expecting to see versus what we actually saw out of the numbers from USDA. And the reason this becomes important is because the USDA numbers, even though they're forecasts and a lot of private companies will do similar kind of forecasting, that really is that the USDA numbers become that kind of that standard, that benchmark that we start to use to say, well, do we think the numbers are gonna be higher or lower? If USDA is wrong, why do we think it's gonna be different? So that USDA number becomes that initial reference point or benchmark that we use to compare, what am I thinking relative to what others might be thinking? So on the first top row, oh, excuse me, the first top row is what the average trade estimate. So there was a survey of about 25 industry analysts and forecasting firms that put information in. This is the average number that they expected to see for ending stocks. So the ending stocks number is a forecast of how much grain do we believe will be an inventory? How much do we think we'll have an inventory just before harvest of next year? And the smaller that number gets, the smaller that our reserves or our carryover stocks become, the higher the prices go, because the market is worried about rationing use, making sure that we have something left over at the end of the year. But we also see a lot of volatility, a market volatility as that stocks to use ratio goes down, volatility goes up. So the top row is what the trade was expecting to see. The row that's highlighted in blue is the numbers from last month. That's from the November numbers. And then the red line on the very bottom, our row is the ones that we got today. So we were expecting, trade was expecting a small cut in all wheat ending stocks. We did see that a little bit more than what USDA had expected or the trade had expected. Two reasons for that, USDA cut the amount of wheat imports just slightly. And they also increased the level of exports slightly. And the export increase primarily came from white wheat. So if we started looking at what classes of wheat, there was really a small increase in the forecasted exports for white wheat. In the middle column is the corn number. There was basically no change. All of the numbers in the November were the exact same numbers we saw in December. So there's no change in the bottom line. On soybeans, again, the trade was expecting to see a cut in a reduction in the ending stocks numbers. And I wanna emphasize that even on the November numbers that 190 million bushels is a relatively small number for soybeans. We haven't seen that small in ending stocks number in quite a few years. So we did see a reduction, not quite as much as what the trade was expecting. The major increase in usage, the production numbers weren't changed, but the increase in usage came in crushing demand. I think there was quite a few trade analysts that were expecting a slight increase or a bump in the exports number as well. But USDA left the export forecast the same, but it did increase the domestic crush. Interestingly enough, when I looked at the soybean oil and the soybean meal balance sheets, the adjustments they made, there was really an increase in both exports for soybean oil and soybean meal. Domestic use for oil and meal stayed the same, but they did increase their forecast for exports. So it looks as though globally, the oil seed market is starting to really tighten up and that's what's driving a lot of the price increases we're seeing right now. So on my next slide, I wanted to give everybody an update on where do we stand for exports and export pace. What's really driving the grain markets and has been for the last several months is two key factors. There's a lot of things going on, but the two biggest ones, number one, Chinese purchases and number two, the weather conditions in South America, in particular, Brazil, but also in Argentina. So I'm gonna touch on some of those issues. So as we move forward now in time, what are some of the things the market will continue to look at? Just to summarize this table very quickly, I realized there's a lot of numbers. Most of the information, most of the numbers on this table are 12 month totals. They're annual sales of US corn, two different countries around the world. Who are our major export customers? The difference is the far right hand column. That far right hand column labeled 2020, 21 with a little asterisk on it is the total export commitments. And again, this information got updated this morning. So I was able to provide the most recent and current information. This is export commitments. So this would be how much grain has actually either been shipped or has been sold but not shipped yet that will be shipped in the near future, starting at the beginning of the marketing year. So for corn and soybeans, that's September one. So think of these as the amount of grain that has already been sold and shipped or yet to be shipped in this current marketing year. So these are bushels that now have been committed and are now held off the marketplace. If you think about it that way, it's saying, well, what's our available supplies? So I wanna compare where we are today to where we have been for yearly totals. Typically, Mexico and Japan are number two, number one and number two largest corn customers. I was a little bit of concerned given the pandemic, given the COVID-19 issues and the global economic recession that Mexico might have some economic problems. So they are having some, but the economic problems don't seem to be impacting their ability to buy US agricultural products. Their purchases of US products, both corn, soybeans and wheat are pretty much right on track with what we would typically see this time of year. So the two biggest customers, Mexico, Japan, then we get into kind of the next level down of customer base. I wanna emphasize or focus on that rope with China. If you look back historically, the Chinese purchases of US corn has been relatively small. We really haven't seen any major export sales since before the Sinjenta problem with the mere 162 trade. And that was one of those non-tariff trade barriers that China used to prevent US corn from entering the Chinese marketplace. Well, because of phase one agreement, those barriers now have been mainly removed. There's still a few in place, but most of it has been removed, which now allows more US corn to flow into the Chinese market. And the Chinese have been very aggressive buyers. If you look at that highlighted red number of 11.3 million metric ton, that is by far a record. In fact, it's double the previous record for export sales to China. So that has really been the surprise in the corn market. I was expecting to see China come in and buy some US corn, but not to the levels that we saw right now. And I think a lot of other traders and analysts would agree with that. So where are we today? We've got a very steady, fairly aggressive export sales program right now for corn. Most of that going into China, but our other customers are coming in and maintaining their purchases too. So this is really the underlying driving force in the corn market. The next slide is the same basic table for soybeans. And as you can see, the number one customer by far has always been China. Even during the trade war that we had between US and China during 2018 and 19 marketing years, our export levels were dropped significantly during that time period, but China was still the number one customer. Again, now that we have this phase one agreement, China is back in the US market buying US soybeans. That soybean purchasing has really accelerated. And to be again, very honest, I think the numbers that we're seeing today are much more aggressive than I had expected. And I know there was in talking to some other folks that do a lot of this analytical work and they were basically in the same camp that we were expecting larger purchases, but these levels that we're seeing today are pretty aggressive. Now, export sales between the US and China are very seasonal and we're now reaching that time of the year where seasonally our export sales start to drop off and they start to pick up or at least the, again, the purchases for delivery later become more aggressive. And I know seeing some reports, there's a large portion of the Brazilian soybean crop has already been sold, even at this time of the year, even though they're planting right now, but there's already commitments for the sale coming out of Brazil. So a fairly aggressive pace. So I do expect to see as we move forward in the next several months that US export sales will start to drop off. But again, the Chinese purchases have been very aggressive. When we look at our other major customers, in particular a place like Mexico, again, fairly steady purchases. It's been pretty much right on pace. The European Union is a little bit further behind what we normally see this time of year, but again, their sales pace can be somewhat sporadic. The next slide, we're looking at the same information then for wheat. Now this would be all wheat classes built together. The wheat export sales, whether it be export sales or export commitments where the sales is actually shipments that leaving the country, these commitments are not only shipments, but again, what we expect to see delivered later on. You know, it's been very steady. It's been pretty much right on pace. Our big customers, Mexico, Philippines, Japan, they've been buying at the regular rates. They've been kind of buying the blend of wheat that we would normally see at this time of year. Towards the bottom of that table, if you notice there's a row named China or labeled China. Again, a bit of a surprise to the wheat market that China has come in and bought as much wheat, US wheat as they have. Now approximately half of those sales have been hard red winter wheat. There has been some white wheat sold as well as a little bit of spring wheat. Now there are some rumors now starting to float around. I don't wanna make too big a deal out of this because they're just rumors. But there are rumors floating around that China has an interest in buying some more US spring wheat. And it would not surprise me at all that that happens. Typically, we start to see our spring wheat export season because it's been delayed a bit because of changing dynamics in the marketplace, really start to pick up and become a bit more aggressive later on in the marketing year. We tend to have to wait until after the first of the year to really start seeing a bit more aggressive sales into the global market. So we'll have to wait to see what happens as we move forward, but it would not surprise me to see that China comes in and buys a little bit more spring wheat. All right, on my next slide, this is the pre-report industry estimates for South American corn and soybean production. And again, I said the two big things we're watching is exports, primarily China, as well as now what's happening in South American weather. So we have a column for Argentina, we have a column for Brazil. The top row is the average trade estimate. So this is what the analyst, private analysts were expecting USTA to come out with. If we look at the blue row towards the middle of the table, that was the production last marketing year, or last year, whoops. We look at the black row, that is the number that we got in November, and of course the red one on the bottom is the one we got today. So the traders were looking for a slight cutback in both corn and soybean production forecast out of Argentina, USDA did see a slight cutback. We took about a million metric ton out of each corn and soybean, but they left the Brazilian crop the same. They left their forecast for total production coming out of Brazil for both corn and soybeans unchanged from November to December. Now, most of the private analysts were looking for a slight cutback. And I think one of the reasons that we didn't see that is that the crop is still young enough that Argentina is now just finishing up planting. You get into the Southern Brazil, they have finished planting and the crop is starting to emerge. When you get into Northern Brazil, the crop has emerged, but it's still in the vegetative state. So it's a little bit early to start talking about too much of a yield cutback because of dry weather at this stage, at this growth stage and growing conditions. I do wanna just really quickly point out, look at the Brazilian corn and soybean production, the far right hand columns, and compare the blue, which is last year's production versus what USDA is currently forecasting. The majority of that increase, just for reference, the majority of that increase in expected production is because of increased plantings. The planted acreage or planted hectares have increased. So any kind of a yield adjustment really hasn't come into the USDA forecasting yet. They're still forecasting a trend line yield at this stage of the game. All right, so if we look at the next slide, this is, I just wanted to provide a quick reference for where our soybeans produced in Brazil, Montegrosso, which is that big state kind of in the middle of the country is the largest producing region. Usually it counts for between 25 and 30% of the total production. So the darker the areas, the more soybeans are produced from a bushel or a ton standpoint, but it's a very diverse production region. It's a very large country. It has a very wide production zone. Montegrosso is obviously the state that we spend a lot of time talking about. But again, a very large growing region, we have a Northern growing region and kind of that Southern growing region closer to Rio Grande do Sol. On the next slide, I do the same thing with Argentina. Argentina is a much smaller country, has a very compact, a very concentrated production region for both corn and soybeans. So the corn and soybean production regions kind of overlap like they do in the US. Again, a smaller production region, very concentrated. So if Argentina has production problems or if they have weather problems that start to show up, the likelihood is that it'll have a heavier impact on again, all of the acres. It's not as geographically diverse. So on my next slide, I wanted to give a brief update on what are the soil moisture conditions. Now this is some computer generated maps. This is just recently updated. I've tried to circle in blue the primary soybean and corn growing regions in Brazil. So that highlighted circle is where most of the soybeans are produced. Notice that you do have areas especially towards the eastern edge of the growing zone that are still relatively dry. So this is very similar to the drought monitor map that comes out in the US, but it's trying to measure the amount of water in the top meter of soil, about the top three feet. This actually has been an improvement for what we saw the last computer runs about two weeks ago. And part of that is because there have been some rain showers that have come through. It's helped improve some of the growing conditions, but the soil moisture in general, soil moisture conditions right now are still relatively dry in a large portion of the Brazilian growing region, which means again, the market's gonna be watching those weather forecasts very, very carefully. So they've got enough rain to keep the crop healthy, but there isn't a lot of soil reserve. So if we miss a few weeks of rains, things could turn negative very, very quickly. On my next slide, I do the same thing trying to highlight that core production zone for Argentina. Again, Argentina over the last week or so has had a bit more widespread rainfall, enough to at least recharge that root zone, but not necessarily given the temperatures right now that they seasonally tend to have that soil moisture conditions and the evapotranspiration rates can change very quickly. So again, there have been rain showers, it's enough to maintain good development growth right now, but again, the crop is very young, not using a lot of moisture at this stage. So the weather forecasts for Brazil and Argentina are gonna be watched extremely closely just because they're kind of on the bubble between being an effective, an average crop or possibly a below average crop. My last slide is just a reminder to everybody that the next WASDE report is going to be on Tuesday, January 12th. When that report is released, we will also get the annual production report. And the reason that's important is because that is the, when USDA releases their final official production numbers for the 2020 growing season. So we'll get the final official numbers for planted acreage, harvested acreage and average yields. And if there are some adjustments or some tweaks that need to be made in any one of those numbers, it will show up in this report. And the report covers not only the major commodities, but a lot of the minor or smaller market crops as well. So again, January 12th will be a very important day in the marketplace. So be ready and be prepared. And with that, I'll turn it over to Tim Petrie for the livestock outlook. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Great to be with you again. If we go to that first slide, today I'm going to mainly talk about what's going on with calf prices, but I do want to call your attention. If you're interested in the sheep market, we do have the monthly newsletter that comes out. Our next one will come out in about a week, I think around December 20th. And I've got an in-depth analysis of the sheep market there along with some charts. So just be looking for that if you're interested in sheep. Go to my next slide. We talk about cattle then. I kind of want to talk about ranges versus averages because on my charts and when I get to those charts, you'll see that I have one price and a lot of people are always asking what our price is going to be and they want one price. And so averages are that, but there is a wide range. So just go to that purple line in the middle there for 550 to 608 calves. You see, this is last week's North Dakota weekly average summary out of USDA. They report three markets. That's Napoleon and Mandan and Stockmans and USDA actually issues a report for each of those markets plus the North Dakota summary. And so this is the North Dakota summary and the website is shown there if you want to go to it or go to my website and I've got all the individual links there and you can just click on them. So last week, although 550 to 608 calves averaged 159 and that's what you'll see on my chart, you see quite a range in prices there. 144 up to 167, 50, $130, $40 a head difference there. So this is significant from a marketing standpoint in that I guess if you're selling calves, prefer to be on the top end of the range and maybe if you're buying calves, the background may be going down under 150 and getting something that you can add value to and maybe makes some more sense in buying the top of the market. But anyway, that's the range, go down. I'm gonna also talk about the 750s to eight. And so almost a $20 range there. And so just one other comment that I usually mention, you know, always is a discount for heifers bigger at this time of the year than when we get into the spring. And so, you know, backgrounding opportunities there too. I suspect we're gonna background a lot of heifers. Again, I didn't circle it, but if you go up to those 450s there at 177 and then go over to the heifers about $30 lower, but by the time you get up to the 550 to six, the $20 lower and as we keep going on down, they get closer and closer to steer prices. So that's what makes heifers kind of attractive there. So let's go to the charts, the next slide and I'm gonna just discuss the lighter weight calves to begin with that we talked about. I like to put the last three years on a chart. And so now we're almost finishing this year. So I'll have four years and we're ready to take the 2017 line off. But the red line there is this year. And so you see, we started off the year about right on 2020, right on 2019 until the COVID hit there and then went down. Also circled there, you'll see that the 1917, 18, 19, we hit a 180 there in the spring. We would have easily done that this year again or maybe even a little better than that because we were already at 177 there in late February but then the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into things. Our expectations were there when we hit that 180 that then we would follow that blue line, which is 2018. And I'm quite confident that we would have done that. The economy was booming, Fed cattle, we're gonna average better. And so we had good grazing conditions at least to begin with. So that's what we would have been but the red line is where we actually ended up. So again, we did go down but kind of leveled off there around 160 plus or minus through most of the summer. It could have been worse when we were talking to you at the webinars before. I said, you know, this fall is gonna be very interesting, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. And I think probably we're kind of ended up with more on the best side. But there by mid-August, you see that peak in prices there up at 165, 166 and actually was above the last couple of years. But as Freen said, then we did run into some production problems on corn and China came in with the exports and a whole bunch of other reasons. He didn't even mention them all. I have that opposite relationship between corn and feeder cattle, rule of thumb is change corn 10 cents, change full calves and dollar in the opposite direction. Other things being equal. And so that's kind of a big thing that I'm gonna talk about here in the next minute or so. But yeah, so then we did see some weakness there and corn gets all the blame for it but that isn't everything to blame as well because if you, you know, a new drought monitor came out today but the whole Western US, not only North Dakota but the whole Western US save a little in the Pacific or Northwest when the North side is very, very dry. And so, yes, corn went up but we had early movement of calves particularly down in the Southwest where it's very, very dry, more calves into market there in September than normal. So that put pressure on the market. Then we have that normal seasonal decline that occurs there. So we bottomed out there on October 15th. And so those that sold calves that week there on October 15th that, you know, hit the low for the year. And then since then we've been rebounding even though corn has continued up, I guess and maybe until the last week or two it's kind of leveled off but then we did see a bounce in prices. So with corn going up then why didn't our rule of thumb hold true? And again, it's because of those other things that I talk about. Back in October 15th, it was very, very dry down in the winter wheat country the winter wheat grazing area, Oklahoma up into Kansas and down a little into Texas. The winter wheat was planted into dust did not do very well but they got it planted on time because it was so dry but there wasn't a winter wheat and that is a spark to calf prices because winter wheat is a very cheap, you know compared to our backgrounding up here where we have to use harvested feeds they turned the calves out on that winter wheat that's gonna go dormant anyway so it's pretty cheap. And so that helps the market but we didn't have winter wheat until it rained there in mid-October in fact, Oklahoma City actually flooded and they got rain and that sparked the winter wheat and greened up so then they came in active after calves and that helped the market and then the other thing too is that the farmer feeders that would be up here more in Iowa and Southern South Dakota in there compared to the Colorado into Kansas bigger commercial lots. They finished the harvest early unlike last year they weren't on the seats because they hadn't gotten the corn done and it snowed early and all that so a combination of factors then sparked our calf market back up so the last several weeks then about the last month we've been doing a little bit better last year which again, based on what it was in April I think that was kind of a feat. So what's ahead in the near term I think we're gonna kind of take a dollar or two off from them this week with the fed cattle futures market has just been kind of struggling there and for the rest of the year we're gonna get into the holidays and then we don't market much anyway so kind of level off there and we got to kind of watch that winter wheat grazing area too because if it would get very dry down there and no greening or anything we would start parking calves earlier. Longer term then of course for next year the big question mark is whether again with half the country being dry and are we gonna have forced liquidation and what's the corn crop gonna be so a lot of issues right now though I'm going back to the we're gonna start lower than 2018 at the beginning of the year but that's what I'm using that light blue line there again across as a guideline now with a good corn crop and getting rain but again that's the big thing we're gonna have to watch there and the other one is still important of course is the pandemic that Frayne alluded to and so on and we're gonna get a vaccine and restaurants back open and so on so that's one of the issues with fed cattle so go to the next slide then we pick up then the heavier weight the yearling 800 pound type of cattle and the basic trends are the same there and you see that 142 market last week that's the average and we have that wide range and so on but you see them going down the same way with the COVID a couple of things I wanna mention on that red line getting towards the right hand side you see that red square there that's November futures that closed actually early in November because of Thanksgiving so closed last Thursday before Thanksgiving there and but you see it 137 and that's right on where our cash market was so that's how close on the average we do track with the futures market and then the orange squares up there are what the futures are trading now for next year and so again kind of compared to the blue line if we go to we have a January and then a March, April, May, spring futures then we have the August, September, October, November so when we get into March we're kind of right where we were in 2018 so I'm kind of using 18 again as a guideline 18 does go up there for the rest of the spring futures and then in the early fall in 2018 they did really well but then sparked back down so for the September, October were quite a bit below 18 but and actually right on where they were this year till they fell off so we can do better than that if Fed cattle do better and the weather cooperates and everything else and then of course the futures are kind of right on 2018 at the end of the year so for the most part again use 2018 except probably there early in the fall but like I said before we got a lot of things ahead of us and weather is my number one concern because of the dryness in the Western US and does that funnel over into the corn belt and how does that affect the cattle industry so move on then just to wrap things up these are our calves and our heavier yearlings and then I didn't talk much about Fed cattle today I'll do that in future webinars but it looks like now cyclically 2020, 2020 would have been better than 2019 and that would have been our low but now with the pandemic we're hopefully put in the lows here in 2020 back up as the chart shows to 2018 levels in 2021 and then if everything goes right the pandemic over and again normal weather and decent corn crops again by 2022 be up the highest that we've been for the last several years back to when we came off those 2014, 15 highs and we're coming down to 2016 so it looks like better times ahead but things can always happen and the weather is the big, big question mark for us that we have to watch so go to the next slide I wanna wish you all a great holiday season and so far the winter's been good for cattle and we hope that continues and let's get some good rains this spring and so we can continue on so with that turn it over to Ron. Good afternoon, my name is Ron Hogan I'm the extension farm management specialist I hope everybody can hear me okay I was having a little technical difficulty there for a while so I guess I'm kind of delegated to the legislation person on this webinar on these webinars and anything COVID related as far as legislation or programs and I wanted to talk about the hospitality economic resiliency grant plus is actually the name of it and it is actually put on by the North Dakota Department of Commerce and the next slide actually shows that and there was some other programs that they had earlier one of them was just basically called the economic resiliency grant and then the next one was the hospitality economic resiliency grant and then this new one now is the hospitality economic resiliency grant plus and that is especially designed for the lodging sector now the previous grant programs that I mentioned are now closed and this one is the one that is open right now so my next slide will tell you a little bit about what's involved here it's for anyone in the lodging businesses in North Dakota that are affected by the pandemic there is some businesses that are considered lodging but they are not eligible such as vacation rentals, bed and breakfast, campgrounds, Airbnb's so next I wanted to talk about some of the requirements the business must have a physical location in North Dakota they must have experienced an impact due to COVID the lodging entity must arrive over half of their sales from lodging and they must have an North Dakota lodging license next when you get this grant it's free money it's not a loan and you need to track this properly and you can pay wages and salaries from that health benefits associated with that and insurance plans any kind of safety training workers come but you are not allowed to pay the payroll taxes that is not an acceptable expense also there is other expenses you can pay that don't deal with payroll such as mortgage and rent, utilities, insurance and marketing and things if there's a food preparation in the hotel you can provide for that and repairs as well so the next thing I wanted to talk about was the amounts you can apply for up to $40,000 applicants that have more than one location can apply up to $80,000 but only $40,000 per location so I wanted to bring you that information and the last slide just shows you that the closing date is December 18th it just opened on December 8th it's a very short window of time to get your application in you just do it online at the and it's kind of self-certifying and so anyway with that I will wish you a happy holidays as well and turn it over to David Thanks, Ron so Dave Ripplinger, Bioproducts, Bioenergy Economic Specialist I just have some quick comments about things that are going on specific to corn ethanol then a bit about North Dakota oil you may have heard because it is national news that passenger travel was certainly down over the Thanksgiving holiday but even beyond that we are starting to see gasoline use, passenger travel, ethanol demand starting to decline the question is if this is something structural or if there is something bad coming on the rise there is a lot of concern of economic activity going forward especially after the New Year and again this is much more than that seasonal difference you know we see that holiday spike as Thanksgiving is a travel holiday we also see just a general decline across the winter season there is less passenger travel as well but it is a lot more than that moving over to the agribusiness side of things you know this weekend demand is one side the supply side isn't particularly positive either right now we are seeing relatively high ethanol production and building stocks because we are not using it and of course this is kind of things on each side going the wrong way at least surprised to me ethanol price has been relatively steady in light of this down 10 or 15 cents but even after yesterday's EIA report you know it really didn't move much after that looking at how things are looking economically for corn ethanol refineries themselves you know margins are low if not negative for most corn ethanol refineries although you know up and two through last Friday they were producing at a pretty steady clip but one of the things and talked about this regularly over the last few weeks ethanol really can't support corn at this price they're taking the price of corn and trying to make things work but you know a movement of corn hires going to take a lot more ethanol folks out of the money also just talking about North Dakota oil WTI isn't where it needs to be to really spur activity you know it's been dancing around the $40 range for a few weeks which is not enough to really heat things up just a couple of slides to reiterate the comments I just made so here's that gasoline supplied so this is going from refiners and folks at the rack getting it further down that supply chain you know you can see that huge dip that occurred with COVID in the spring a recovery not to full levels then if you just look at that last data point there you can see that dip and of course is that a temporary phenomenon or is it something bigger and again this is a four week average so that ends up smoothing out some issues and there's always concerns too about weather and different timing of Thanksgiving in terms of the actual day of the month but again since this is four weeks it's a little bit should even out some of those issues and again the number is down and it is down if you look at the actual specific numbers it's down relative to what that relationship we kind of had from July through October where things were tracking at that same relative level in terms of gasoline supplied ethanol production as I mentioned is essentially a high from the low that we experienced in the spring moving up at a pretty steady clip and numbers that prior to COVID would have been very good weekly numbers about a million barrels a day which equates to about 15 billion gallons but again not quite to where we were a year ago in terms of production but again growing at a time when demand is falling so again that's gonna lead us to this which is the storage issue this is storage in terms of ethanol days and that's clearly been increasing at a pretty steady clip for a few weeks now not necessarily a good sign although as I mentioned prices have been pretty stable but again the whole point from this especially from that general agricultural perspective ethanol is in a pretty weak position and there's a lot that remains to be seen of what the winter driving season is gonna look like last thing as I mentioned was just that WTI spot price and North Dakota drilling activity it's actually surprising is that drill numbers or rig numbers are up the last few weeks from nine to 14 which is on a percentage basis it's huge and even an increase of five is notable even though we're not back to that break even level I think my number's actually too low it came down a little bit so that's at 45 it should be a 51 high above that current price that $28 again that's in the wrong spot too that $28 existing well break even we're clearly above that this doesn't show up and I've had slides for recent weeks where you do see that period of time where we actually did have a number of wells coming offline at least temporarily then brought back and so now we're just sitting here wondering if we can hit that $60 mark we're gonna be doing well if not it's gonna be tough there's a lot of different issues that things that could possibly move that price there's a lot of concerns about environmental regulations the interest of the majors and exactly what they wanna do with oil even in the near term and there's always a threat of conflict in the Middle East which as the current administration's days end of waning hopefully that doesn't get heated up too much my point I didn't I might not be as funny as Tim's or as pleasant as Tim's but we only have three weeks left in this year so I think we're gonna make it we're really close to that finish line and so possibly putting for some of us either personally professionally or otherwise a pretty tough or a unique year behind us so with that I'd like to bring all the other panelists back to adding their video and audio unfortunately our Q&A tool is not open today but you can use chat so if you'd be interested in asking a question just go ahead and plug it into chat either to all panelists or to a specific panelist might work best they send it to all panelists so you can see it and double check we do have one question right now that all I know is intended for frame rest of world soybean exports seem much higher what's driving that China taking more from South America and forcing the rest of the world to the US to find supply? No, not necessarily so the one thing just for reference the rest ROW is rest of world and so I identified specific countries and then that was kind of the category for everybody else for soybeans the number we've had so far for commitments is about 12.6 just under 12.6 million metric done so 12.6 of that 12.6 I just looked it up 8.1 of that is for unknown destinations so what happens when a US company makes the sale of an ag product to another company a lot of times they will identify where is that grain going to be delivered? Well sometimes sales are made between company A in the United States and company B internationally and company B doesn't identify which country it's going to be delivered to so then it gets dumped into this unknown category now once the grain is delivered they're supposed to come back and modify their reporting to make sure that we can track where did that go? So right now there's been about 8.1 million metric ton that is been sold some of it's been delivered some of it's yet to be delivered but we don't know the country destination yet so a large portion of this rest of world this kind of every place else hasn't been identified. Great thanks Fran. Just a quick reminder we will be continuing this webinar series monthly on the Thursday after the WASDE if you saw Fran mentioned that the next WASDE is on Tuesday, January 12th so our webinar will be two days later on the 14th again at one o'clock central time. If there's any other questions you have the opportunity to do that for a few more minutes I'd ask the panels if they have any other points that they'd want to make anything that came up after their talk. I guess I would like to kick that off a little bit Dave I just want to springboard off of some of the things that you said in particular about corn and corn demand and that's something that Dave and I have talked about I guess privately is I'm a little bit concerned that as prices of corn have come up because of the Chinese demand which is again is a very good thing from a agricultural production standpoint that the increased corn price really has put some pressure on the ethanol industry. And in my opinion it's this trade-off now between how much corn is gonna be exported and delivered relative to our domestic demand that's really gonna start putting a cap or an upper limit on our current corn inventory. So the only way in my opinion that we're gonna be able to keep pushing corn prices higher is we need to maintain that base of exports but we also need to have energy prices start to increase to allow the profit margins in the ethanol industry to be maintained. Cause if we don't see that kind of an increase if we don't see prices and consumption start to rebound as corn prices go higher it simply means that we're gonna have more ethanol plants shutting down and that's gonna put the cap on corn prices. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm concerned about too. Did anyone else have a comment or a point that they'd like to make? If not, again, we'll be back in about a month. Also, if you wanna see the slides that we had today we're recording of this webinar you can visit the webinar web series page which is on the board. So basically going to our farm management site and there's an Outlook page. It also has the list of future dates through 2021 which we've scheduled and the ability to register for those events. Tim did mention our newsletter which it comes out monthly. It's a great resource, has some in-depth looks at some pretty practical but an important agribusiness agricultural issues. The next one will be out in just a few weeks and look forward to that. Most of you who've registered you'll be added to the mailing list so you should see that in your email boxes shortly. If you don't, we actually do have the previous editions archived online as well. There's nothing else. I wanna wish everybody happy holidays, safe travels. Hopefully COVID doesn't disrupt things too much and then we'll see you next year. Thanks.