 As in previous weeks, please give us feedback, especially if there's some topics that you want to hear about. And we're definitely engaged with Market News and giving you timely information, but there's anything specific you'd like to hear more about. Please let us know. And with that, I'll hand it over to Brian Parman. Hey, thanks, Dave. So glad to be back again this week presenting this information to you guys. A lot of stuff's happened. Some information has come out, and I'm going to try to put the macro situation together best I can and kind of try to tie it into ag. So another week and another set of unemployment figures has come out, and on my next slide, I've kind of changed the graph around because we're getting more of these unemployment weeks and the way I'd shown it last week wasn't very, is getting kind of busy. So just to reiterate for those who haven't seen this before, what we have is in March, we had record unemployment filings. It spiked up really quickly to about 6.8 million from 3.3, which 3.3 was a massive record. 6.8 was obviously more than double that. It started trending downwards. We're having fewer millions of people filing for unemployment every week, but it's still historically high. When you think about the fact that before this had ever even occurred, it was 695,000 was the most people who'd ever filed for unemployment, new unemployment filings in a week. And so my next slide kind of shows exactly when we talk about unemployment, there are different metrics for actually how it is basically analyzed, okay? And some folks will say unemployment and mean one thing, and some folks will say unemployment and mean something else. And the two biggest ones that get used in the media and by economists are what are called U3 and U6. U3 is kind of the official unemployment figure that you'll see posted around when they talked about in December and January unemployment around 3.5%, 3.6%, historically low. That was U3 unemployment, and that's total unemployed as a percentage of the civilian labor force, okay? So here's the thing. What is considered the labor force is very different between U3 and U6, and if you look at the U6, which is kind of what we naturally just think of unemployed, and that's the total unemployed plus anyone who is working part-time and wants a full-time job but can't find one, or working some low-paying job but is overqualified for it, or somebody who has just given up looking for a job altogether and because they can't find one and have been long-term unemployed, that's U6. So if you just leave the labor force and just give up, you're not in the counted in U3. You're counted in U6 though, which is why you see U6 being double sometimes or close to double what the U3 unemployment statistic that's often quoted is. And I bring that up because I want to show on my next slide kind of where the unemployment figures are projected to be. So the 30.4 million new unemployment filings due to the shutdown, okay, due to the national shutdown and COVID. So to put that into perspective, during the entire Great Recession, the entire portion of the Great Recession, there were 37.12 million new unemployment filings, and that was from December 2007 through June 2009, roughly 18 months, a year and a half. This was done in more like six weeks, okay? So the amount of unemployed people that filed for new unemployment in the last six weeks is going to probably be greater than the Great Recession in the next few weeks, really, if these numbers keep up. So the U3 projection is between 18 and 24 percent, and we just talked about what U3 is, which would be that folks who are still looking for a job, things like that, 18 to 24 percent. The U6 projection, around 30 or more percent of the population who is either given up looking for a job or grossly underemployed or only working part-time but would like to find a full-time job. So the question will be, when it comes to this unemployment figure, and it's a question on all of our minds and all of us economists, whether it's Tim, Fray and myself, is how fast are these jobs going to come back and how many will actually come back? That's really the biggest question. That is the trillion dollar question now, is how many and how fast? Because it's not as if you might think, well, if it was a viable restaurant, for instance, on some corner in Bismarck or Fargo, well, it will be a viable restaurant as soon as folks return to whatever form of normalcy that is. But it just may not be the same ownership, may not be the same employees, and it may take two years before that happens, and somebody comes in and buys it for cents on the dollar and reopens it. So again, that's speaking to how fast will the jobs return, and there may be some sectors where jobs don't return at all. Next slide, please. So let's talk a little bit about global growth. Because this is a global, it's called a pandemic because it's global, right? And we, I have been focused pretty exclusively on domestic issues for the last several segments, but I want to talk about how this is affecting us, how this is affecting globe and how it's going to affect demand, exports, and jobs that count on those domestically. So we look at Canada GDP growth rate, and the countries I've selected, let me back up, the countries I've selected are our biggest trading partners, I didn't choose them randomly. They're some of our biggest trading partners, and especially some of our biggest ag trading partners. That's the important thing. So Canada basically had zero growth in the first quarter of 2020, which, spoiler alert, that's the best one I'm going to show is almost zero. And then the US is GDP growth rate minus 4.8%, and that's a quarterly number. So my next slide shows two of our next biggest trading partners. Obviously, China is a big one. China had about a 9.8% contraction in the first quarter. And then this is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics or Bureau of Statistics of China, which is then compiled by us. But they're saying negative 9.8% in the first quarter. The largest drop in basically since they've been keeping records and actually went quasi-capitalist. Another big trading partner, Japan, their growth rate negative 1.8% in the first quarter. And remember, Japan wasn't, a couple of those countries over there, like South Korea and Japan, it was thought that they had a pretty good grip on things and didn't, I don't think, were as heavily impacted as some other countries. But that China numbers is extremely, an extremely big contraction. Next slide, please. So the EU, another one of our big trading partners, down close to 4% in the first quarter. And then, of course, Mexico, who was pretty late to being impacted according to the data we got on the number of COVID cases based on that Johns Hopkins map that everybody looks at, down about 1.6%. They'd been contracting a little bit the previous four quarters, but apparently they were not without effect. And the big thing to keep in mind with this is this really only impacted for us in Canada and Mexico. The last couple of weeks in March. Now China was impacted obviously much earlier than that, as were some of the other Eastern Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, which I didn't show. But they were impacted much earlier, so the severity like in China, for instance, where everything originated is obviously much worse. And the expectation is that in the United States is going to show the same thing. Next slide, please. So the initial Q1 GDP contraction of negative 4.8% in the United States. 3.5% was expected, that was the projected contraction. And remember that again, that was only two weeks. Now the other expectations are that it's going to be revised downward. It is very common during recessions to go back and re-revised the either growth or contraction back up or down because the information coming in is heavily lagged. So they'll go back and say instead of 4.8%, it was actually 6% or 7. And it could be quite large or maybe even double. Now the predictions are for, this is predictions for Q2 in 2020. It will be the single largest quarterly drop in GDP in US history. That is, I'll say that again, the predictions are that it will be the single largest quarterly drop in US history. The Congressional Budget Office projects 12% second quarter decline. And if I annualize that, it becomes a 40% contraction in US GDP. So literally our economy contracts 40% in a quarter. That is pretty incredible. So if you look at 12% plus the quarterly drop in Q1, it is pretty dramatic and obviously unprecedented. Next slide, please. So the big sectors that are affected, consumer spending, which is about 70% of GDP, declined to 7.6%. So 70% of our gross domestic product went down a little over 7.5%. Durable goods spending, those would be like TVs, things that tend to last a long time, including cars and stuff, down 16%. Services, I'm a little surprised the services were only down 10%, considering service industries were hit pretty heavily, although you've got some folks like taxpayers and stuff who maybe not impacted as much. Exports down 9%. And then imports down 15.3%. So I guess if you wanted to see a reduction in the gap between imports and exports, that's one way to do it, I suppose, is shut everything down. Next slide, please. So just a quick note on the Fed. There were some comments that came out from our Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and other heads of federal reserves around the country and basically indefinite low interest rates. That's pretty much what they've said. It's probably not going to be quarters. It's probably going to be years. And the target that they want to reach, and this is something I've said in many of my talks many times that you guys have heard, about a 5% unemployment rate and 2% inflation is kind of the Fed's target. And the other thing to the big concern that they're having is the possibility of deflation. OK, and if you guys remember, inflation is where you're buying power, your dollar is reduced, prices are going up, so every dollar you have will buy less. Deflation is the opposite. Every dollar you have will buy more as prices actually decline. And that sounds like a really good thing initially, but it really isn't because a lot of us, especially in agriculture, carry debt. And so during periods of deflation, your debt does not go down, but the value of the products that you're selling do. That's basically what happened in the Great Depression was rampant deflation, where if you bought a bunch of land and bought it for whatever price, now the prices of your commodity back then, a big part of it was wheat, was cut in half and prices everywhere else, but your debt was not cut in half to match the declining prices. So you're stuck with this debt that you're not making enough money to pay back. And the same thing in a consumer society with high student loan debts and credit card debts and things like that, deflation is not helpful to the average consumer. And the Fed chairman also said that more spending will be needed from Congress. We've already had unprecedented spending unprecedented doesn't really do justice to the amount of spending and stimulation that's been pumped into the economy right now, but Fed chairman Powell said that more may be needed. It may wind up happening. Again, we just don't know, but I'm sure that you guys have seen in the news, all the ideas being kicked around from mortgage forbearances to living wage payments to another round of money being sent just to consumers. So I believe that was my last slide. I'm obviously gonna be on to address any questions that you might have on everything from interest rates to the macro economy to housing to whatever. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Frank Olson. Thank you. All right, thank you, Brian. So I'm Frank Olson, I'm a crop economist and marketing specialist with NDSU Extension. I'm gonna try and springboard off of some of the things that Brian had started talking about and really look not just internally domestically, but what's happening kind of globally with this COVID-19 and what is the impact economically on some of our major trading partners? And again, recognizing that at least in the crop sector, a large percentage of our grains end up going overseas. Just to get a reminder, 40 to 45% of our soybeans are exported approximately 50, 50, 0% of our wheat is exported and about 15%, one five of our corn is exported. Again, so the markets have a huge role to play in kind of the pricing of grain and potential economic recovery. So on my first slide, I try and provide just again a background on the definition of demand because right now the real underlying concern in the markets is what is our demand base? How is our demand base changing? What does this demand base really look like? And so I wanted to make sure everybody understood what we're talking about. The broad definition of demand is a consumer's desire to purchase goods or services and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service. So in a very broad context, that's what we talk about. But for this discussion today, I really wanna talk more specifically about effective demand. And again, it's not necessarily just a play on words, but there is some subtle differential, definitional differences, excuse me. So effective demand is a consumer want or need supported by an ability to pay. And the emphasis in this definition is on, first, the incomes. Your income provides individuals with a purchasing power with exercise and a marketplace. And consumers have a budget constraint. We often forget when we talk in very big pictures in the sense that consumers have a budget constraint. So giving your budget, how do you prioritize what you're gonna spend your money on? And one of the reasons we're watching the employment number so closely as well as we're looking at kind of general economic contractions and the rate of those contractions is really tied back to what is this consumer's budget constraint? If you've already been laid off or if you're concerned about job and job security, obviously your vision of your budget constraint is very different than if you were fully employed in the economy was growing and expanding. So on the next slide, I tried to provide some background and context for kind of how large is the world's economies? So as we talk about these contractions, either expansions or contractions, typically in percentage changes, we've got to realize that these different economies are of different size. Now I've tried very hard throughout the rest of my presentation to use one consistent source of data and I'm leaning on the International Monetary Fund because they do a lot of work globally and they try and compare what's going on in different countries. So again, I'm worried about consistency of data and making sure that when we're making these relative comparisons that we're doing it correctly. So the most recent consistent data we have closed out of accounts is 2018. You can see in the United States as a single country is the largest economy in the world. On the right hand side, I also put an estimated population. Again, that's from the US Census Bureau. All of these numbers, again, a population are from the US Census Bureau. So in the United States, we've got about a $20.5 trillion economy. China is about a $13.3 trillion economy, but obviously they have almost well, a little over four times the population base we do. And then those are really the big two single economies. Then we drop down to Japan and we get into some of the European countries like Germany, the UK, France, Italy. India is also one of the top five or six. Again, you can see the population base there and I often get questions, well, why don't we focus more on exports, agricultural exports into India? And part of it is their economy is not quite as large, but they're also more self-sufficient in agriculture. So there's a lot of things going on kind of behind the scenes, but I did wanna give an indication of the relative size of economies and that when we talk about a contraction in the US economy, that has implications not only here, but also internationally. On the next slide, I also look at who are the major exporting countries? Who do we sell as the US sell most of our agricultural products to? And again, the ranking we have here, this is USDA foreign ag service data. The numbers here are from a data set that are slightly different than the data set that's being used for the phase one agreement. So the phase one and trade agreement is using a slightly different bundle of agricultural products. So the numbers here aren't gonna exactly match up to some of the things I've had in previous presentations, but the point is I wanna try and make, emphasize the relative size. How much in dollar term, how much agricultural products do we export to these other countries? And I think surprising to a lot of people, Canada is actually number one, very closely followed by China and then also Mexico. So those are kind of the top three. And then we get into Japan, the European Union and South Korea. And of the countries on this list, the one that I'm most personally most concerned, I'm trying to find more information out is about Mexico. Because again, Mexico is the number one buyer of US corn, it's the number two buyer of US soybean and historically has been number one buyer of US wheat. And so again, that Mexican demand base is very, very important for the crop sector as we move forward in time. On the next slide, I've tried to provide some historical background. Now this is again GDP growth. So what's the growth rate? If it's positive, it's increasing, the economies are growing and we're asking how quickly are these economies growing? And the growth rate of GDP is one measure of kind of financial health of a country. So if we see a nice, stable, consistent GDP growth that's positive, that provides us, and especially like in the United States case where it's a very large economy, as long as that continues to grow and is very stable, people feel very, very comfortable. So the red line is the United States, I'm using that as kind of our base and reference point. Now if we look at the countries that we sell, most of our agricultural commodities too in the form of value, you can see that China actually has a growth rate on a percentage term that's larger than New West. And I won't go into the details of why that's happening, but just understand, we're trying to do accounting of these growth rates as accurately and consistently as possible. If you look at all of the other countries on this chart or on this table, historically with the exception of 2009, nine, 10 time period, primarily 2009, which was the last great recession, we're seeing relatively stable growth rates of all these countries, they're all within that two and a quarter or one to two and a half percent range, which is really considered to be acceptable in most people's minds. Now the last two years of this chart, so the numbers or values for 2020 and 2021 are forecasted numbers. So this is where the International Monetary Fund has tried to forecast global growth as well as growth by country. And this is some information that just came out now in April from some runs or some forecasts they had made based on COVID-19. I also wanna emphasize, going back to Brian's points, this is annualized data. So this would be either expansion or contraction over an average of the entire year. We're not looking quarter by quarter by quarter, we're looking at the annual numbers. And so for these major kind of what we call the dominant economies in the world, it looks as though the contraction is gonna be very similar for most of the countries, again, with the exception of China. So if you look at the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, I'm using Germany as a proxy for the EU and South Korea, all of those look like they're gonna, with the exception of South Korea. I apologize, are looking at a contraction of anywhere six to 7%. Now, I don't wanna get too hung up in the IMF forecast, but I do wanna show that at least with their modeling, with the expectations and the systems they have in place, they're expecting the contraction rates, the drop in their economic base in all of these countries to be very, very similar. On the next slide, I do the same thing, again, going back historically, looking at what's the unemployment rate. Now, again, given the information that Brian just presented, this would be the U3 numbers. So this would be the more common one that you see in the press. Again, the numbers going back historically are the actual numbers that had been reported. United States unemployment rate is in the red. And again, the color coding is for each of the respective countries. Again, the 2020 and 2021 numbers are forecasts. So this is IMF's forecast for average unemployment rate for the entire calendar year. So again, based off of their forecasting, what they're expecting is a relatively large pop in the unemployment rate, with a slight drop in that percentage rate as we get into 2021 and start to build on the economic recovery. On the next slide, I've done the same procedure. So here's GDP growth rate. So this is growth rates of their economies for some of what we're considering the emerging ag trading partners. So primarily in South Asia. When we're in this region, we look to the Asian markets as kind of our primary demand base for the products we grow in North Dakota. We ship most of our grains through the PNW. We have logistical advantages going into some of these countries. I also want to point out, again, the red bar, the red line is the United States. The yellow line is the Philippines. And I do want to target the Philippines for just a minute because the Philippines is the number one buyer of US Spring Week. And so this Philippines market is critically important for US Spring Week. It is by far the number one buyer of US Spring Week. Now, when you look at the growth rates, the average growth rates for these South Asian countries have been well above what we've seen in the United States. Now, their economies are smaller, but they're growing faster. And what surprised me a little bit as I was looking at these numbers and trying to evaluate them was the growth rates are a lot more stable, at least within the last 10 years or so, much more stable than I had expected them to be. Now, when you look at, again, IMF's forecast for how large a contraction are they going to go through, what's that potential rebound as we get into the 2021 calendar year, the percentage drop in the United States looks as though it's going to be larger than the percentage drop we have in some of these emerging countries. So knock on wood, let's hope that, again, the contractions going on in these emerging trading partners will not be as heavily impacted as it is here in the US. On the next slide, I look for the emerging trading partners. Again, these are the companies that we look to for our growth potential. This is the unemployment rates. As you can see, unemployment rates in a lot of those countries are relatively low. I do think some of that is just because of the accounting procedures they're using to track unemployment. But again, in a relative sense, that that is a positive thing that I'm viewing and saying, yes, there is an expectation of unemployment rates to increase over the next 12 months or so. But again, assuming that they can rebuild their economies and this COVID-19 does not have any long-lasting impacts on people's consuming habits, it looks like, again, the forecast is for unemployment rates to go back to the levels that we were pretty similar before the COVID-19 problem. On the next slide, I tried to focus on those countries that are major ag competitors. It's not just, again, who do we sell to, but what's happening in our competing countries, the countries we compete with in the global markets. So again, I use the red line as United States as that reference point. The blue line is Brazil and the green line is Argentina. And then we have Russia in the black, Ukraine in the gold, and Australia in the purple. I guess I wanna point, I guess I wanna, if you can isolate out and look at what's happening, I'd like to point to both Brazil and Argentina. And both Brazil and Argentina have had their economies, Brazil's economies rolled for the large in the global sense, but they've had very large swings in their GDP growth. Their economy is not nearly as stable as many other developing countries as we look forward. And I know Brazil is very heavily dependent upon oil and oil revenue. And of course, we've seen a major drop in crew real prices. And so there's increasing concerns about the economic stability of the Brazilian economy in a broad sense, as well as in the Argentine economy. And then my last slide is the unemployment rates for again, our major competitors, the countries that we're competing with selling our product. And as you notice, the unemployment rate in Brazil has been high and growing for the last seven or eight years. This COVID-19 outbreak is not gonna help with that. Argentina has also had relatively high unemployment rates, again, signaling that their economies are not as strong as they historically have been or relative to the strength of the US economy or what we would consider the major economies of the world. So just in summary, we are watching this very closely. We're watching not only how is the economic impacts of COVID-19 impacting the people that we're selling to, but also the folks that are competing with us in the global market. And so with that, I'll hand things off to Tim. Okay, good afternoon, everybody. Tim Petrie, extension livestock marketing economist. If I go to my first slide, I'm just basically gonna talk most about cattle today. And if you have questions about other market classes, like we said, just go into question and answer. Last time, I showed you the cattle and feed estimates because the report was coming out after we visited last year or last week, I should say. And the report came out about what we expected. We expected cattle and feed to be down. We expected placements to be down, the average of the estimates, you know, 18% or so. And a lot more cattle marketed in March, about 12% more was the estimate. And they actually even came out more pronounced cattle and feed about 94%. And we placed about 77% of what we placed a year ago in. We marketed over 13% more. So later on, I'm gonna talk more about North Dakota prices, but this is one of the reasons why we're still seeing a good demand for 78 weight cattle in North Dakota because the feed lots in Nebraska sold a lot of cattle and they didn't place a lot of cattle. So there's extra space down there and they got high moisture corn. Again, like I've said before in the bunker and either haul it out of a nurse spread or feed it to cattle. So when we get to that later on, just remember that. So yeah, on the charts below, it just shows the kind of dramatic decline in placements and then the increase in the fed cattle that we sold, which is actually good to sell all those cattle and get them out of the way in March because of the struggle with packing plants that we have. Now go to the next slide, please. And the question then is how is North Dakota doing on marketing? Did we sell a lot less? And then the other thing that we wanna cover is for that Corona Food Assistance Program coming out, how many cattle might be eligible for a payment? We have no idea how much the payment is gonna be but how many are eligible. So two things here. Here's the North Dakota Stockman's Association brand inspection report for both 19 and 2020 for January through March. Now the CFAP law again goes through April 15th. So there would be a few more but this kind of would tell us how many are eligible. And then this wouldn't be just for March like we did on the cattle and feed. This would be for January through March. So the top, well, you see there's steers, cows, heifers, bulls, calves, horses, the total and so on. So 2019 gives you the number there. And 2020 numbers, you know, some more steers and some more cows, a little less heifers and the calves a little less. I kind of summarize that in the one easier to read I think in the middle in that these would be the cattle that were sold from January 1st to the end of March that would supposedly qualify for any decline in price. And again, that's all to be determined by USDA in total there only down about 17, close to 18,000 I guess this year versus last year. But we look, so we've got about 300 and 65,000 calves and background to cattle that sold during that time. So we got a lot waiting in line for a payment. We don't know if beef cows, it was the intent of a lot. We don't know if beef cows are going to be included or not. And we're certainly hopeful of that on January 1st. As you see in the map at the bottom, we had, you know, 995,000 cows there. So go to the next slide. This is then the this week's market report. And we're, you know, unlike at the packing level where we're struggling with packers being closed and so on, our auction markets are still humming away. We had a really big week last year sold 7,500 feeder cattle and up from last week, a couple of thousands. So cattle are moving and there's the prices. I'm not going to go through all of those, but you see on the top there for those lightweight cattle that can go on grass, still a pretty good demand given all the circumstances and what fed cattle have done and all the uncertainty up there at, you know, for the 600 pounders at 155 and down to the 450 pounders at, you know, 172, 173. And then we've been talking all along about these 750 to 800 pound cattle, backgrounded cattle. Again, we did an average of 130. Again, kind of a wide range that always occurs there and just mentioned, you know, those fleshy cattle just above the bottom red circle error really getting discounts. So it's probably too late to tell, you know, but really be careful of shoveling the corn to them because you're going to get a discount. So anyway, given all the circumstances, respectable prices and I'll kind of relate that to the US situation in a minute. So we'll go to the next slide. Here's our chart then for the 750 to eight weight cattle. Again, the red line coming down is what they have done in prices since the first of the year. And so yeah, we came down a little bit in the last couple of weeks. They're right there at 130. Again, the square boxes are the futures. What the feeder cattle futures and some more on that in a minute. But interesting there, I left the January and March and April squares on there. They closed and the April contract closed yesterday. So more on that in a minute. But April feeder cattle contract closed at 120 but our 750 to eight weight cattle which is what the futures market is based on sold for $130, $10 higher. So what's that telling you? It tells you there's a really good demand for calves up here and they're selling better than in the rest of the US. And so, you know, I'm just trying to look for some silver lining. I know that's a lot lower price than you expected but on the other hand, things could be worse because they're selling for less in the US and we're about $10 higher there. And so when we go to the next slide, just to emphasize that a little more, here's the April feeder cattle and then the CME cash index is the green line and that CME cash index is just all the 700 to 900 pound cattle sold at markets reported by AMS in the US and the two need to come together at the end. And so you see the market worked like it was supposed to the cash settlement price and the futures yesterday both closed right there at 119 but on and so this, so that 119 is the average of all seven to nine lead cattle in the US but you saw in the previous slide that we did 130 on 758 weight. So again, just a little silver lining and a lot of bad information that we've had to give you. So let's go to the next slide. And a very busy, busy slide and all I wanted to do here is just throw a bunch of different headlines and there's all kinds of misinformation being thrown about and I'm not going to go through every one of these and you can see, but I do want to hit some high points on the top one kind of small print there but this relates to that coronavirus fruit assistance program. We may have given you a little false hope last week and that we said it with that that USDA was going to submit it to the OMB office of management and budget a last week and then they had a couple of weeks and it looks like maybe the USDA didn't get it there last Friday and some question is it today and again, OMB has a couple of weeks. So again, don't expect a payment here in the next couple of weeks, I guess is what we're saying because it's maybe and maybe it rushes through before that but it's just a monumental task USDA has and then the OMB has to look at it and then go back to USDA and so on. So it'll probably take a little while. The other thing then that I want to cover is this Defense Production Act as it on those, that second one on the right hand side there that Trump issues the, you know that the act to Defense Production Act to keep meat plants going and again, a lot of misinformation there and so I just want to clean a little bit of that up. One is that packers do not have to open up. Some people say now packers have to open up. They do not have to open up. It does what it does in the next one down there Purdue says, of course, it reduces the liability and that packers have a defensible answer for opening up but again, the liability question is probably gonna be in the courts. The packers still have to follow CDC and OSHA guidelines and if they do that, then, you know they're on the right track. However, the act does not force employees to go to work if the packing plant opens up and say you've got to come to work employees because Trump said so that is in the case like might be a wartime issue where you draft people and they got to go to war they don't have to go to work. The government can't force them and on the other hand, if they quit and don't come back and they quit they aren't eligible for unemployment benefits so many of them may think about coming back to work because otherwise they wouldn't qualify for unemployment. Another thing that it does do is it keeps local government from closing plants. There have been issues where mayors have I'm closing down that plant because whatever it's full of coronavirus or whatever and so governors and mayors now can't shut a plant down because the president's rule there supersedes that. Another misinformation is this prevents us from exporting that there can be no exports it has to stay in the US for domestic consumption. I'm talking about meat here and we do export like Frayn was talking about. We export 30% of our pork and 12, 15% of our beef and on down the line. It does not eliminate exports. In fact, when Trump signed this bill he said I want exports to continue and keep on going and do everything we can to continue the export market. And he also announced that as of July 1st the USMCA US, Mexico, Canada trade deal would be effective because all the countries have signed off so as July 1st that will be effective. Also some information about contracting and saying that now packers do not have to honor contracts for feed lots that have contracted cattle for them and that is not correct. This does not let them out of contractual arrangements. One aside to that is there's a thing called force majeure and Frayn is really an expert on this. So later if we have a discussion there we might bring him a bit. Force majeure is part of a contract and if written in says for some acts like wartime or act of God and other things it's a small print and contracts that said then we can use force majeure to not honor the contract. So if that was in a contract that's separate from the defense production act and in that case they could nullify a contract I suppose but then is coronavirus an act of God is probably a legal question. So I'm probably opening up more can of worms here than I intended to but just doing some of this talking about some of that. So I'm not gonna read through all those in the interest of time we gotta move along. On the bottom that highlighted thing I think is kind of interesting. Congressman Peterson in Minnesota is promising for livestock that have to be euthanized or whatever depopulated. He says that they're gonna be covered in the next COVID bill. And again maybe there's some more good news again that he says there's gonna be another COVID bill and probably not a surprise to a lot of us. There might be several more but he says there's gonna be one. And so I think that's the end of my prepared remarks and we'll turn it over to Ron I think or as a David. Ron yeah. Good afternoon thank you Tim. I'm Ron Howland extension farm management with NDSU. And I just have a couple slides here that show you I wanted to talk to you about some Bank of North Dakota loans. So my first slide then shows a couple loans that Bank of North Dakota actually kind of repurposed for businesses affected by COVID. So there's two financing programs to assist North Dakota businesses and they actually just became available last Wednesday, April 29th. One of them is called the self loan. It's a small employer loan fund. And the other one is a CPRP which is a COVID-19 PACE recovery program. Now so they've allocated $200 million for interest buy downs and $50 million for low interest loans. The buy downs are of course, Bank of North Dakota will be working with lenders and the buy downs will be leveraged to provide up to two billion in loans. Now I wanna emphasize that these programs are not available for farmers at this time, but just to make you aware of these programs for now, those that are interested in this, just go to the website as I have listed there, contact the Bank of North Dakota for further details. I'm gonna get into some of the information on these two types of loans. So the next slide shows some information regarding the self loan, the small employer loan fund. And these are just highlights for the details, please contact the Bank of North Dakota. And so this loan is for businesses that have economic injury as the result of COVID. And it's for North Dakota businesses with 10 employees or less. Now those are actually 10 full-time equivalents. So if you have some part-time employees that aren't working full days, if your total is 10 full-time equivalents or less, you qualify. The proceeds are to support working capital, recurring expenses, and inventory replenishment. These funds cannot be used for capital purchases, business expansion, or refinancing existing debt. And also they can't be used for providing dividends. If you have gotten, if a business has gotten funds from the PPP loans, that does not affect your eligibility for this loan. The basic rule is that you can get a loan up to the amount of $50,000 or six months of your typical operating expenses, whichever is less. Very formidable terms, 1% interest, 120 months. You can also get six months of payment deferral. The next slide will show the PACE loan. And I wanna apologize, I have a spelling error on the title there, it's supposed to be C-P-R-P. I've got my Rs and P's mixed up. But the COVID-19 PACE recovery program. And this loan is also for anyone that has an economic injury as a result of COVID-19. The proceeds should be used to support your working capital as with the other loans, as with the self-loan. This is not for capital purchases or business expansion, refinancing of existing debt, or relocating your business. And here again, if you have gotten funds from the PPP program, this does not affect your eligibility. So for businesses with 500 or less employees, the loan amount you can get is up to $5 million or six month of your typical operating expenses. For businesses with over 500 employees, you get the lesser of 10 million or six month of operating expenses. The terms are 3.75% fixed. For five years, there is a 1% buy down available. The terms are 10% amortized with a five-year balloon payment. And lenders at their discretion can give you six months of deferral on payments. Now those are the basics of these loans that just came out. And so I encourage, if you know somebody or make them aware of these loans and contact the Bank of North Dakota for further details. So with that, I will turn it over to Dave. Great, thanks, Ron. Dave Ripplinger, Bioproducts, Bioenergy Economic Specialists with NDC Extension. Just a quick summary of what's been going on in the energy markets, and then we'll move into questions. Basically, ethanol continues to operate about 50% capacity as it has for the last few weeks. Margins are getting a tish better, which is an okay sign. And then what we've actually seen and what was expected, the numbers that came out on Wednesday from last Friday, we basically turned the corner. Stocks have gone down. Use is greater than production, which is a good sign, although times are still definitely trying for corn ethanol refineries in the United States. Kind of going along with that too, gasoline use in the last two weeks has risen 10% over what was in the middle of the month and 15% over the low, which was basically April one, which is a good sign. Oil has been a little bit more quiet this week versus last week, but the impending stock issue is still on the horizon and getting closer. Just looking a little bit at production input and days in storage. So input again is energy parlance for use. So this would be ethanol that's used by refiners, blenders, you know, as we're blending gasoline. And so you can see that in the last week, things have crossed over again so that blue input or use is now bigger than that orange production, which is actually not typically the case, even in good times, but that's where we are now as we start drawing down stocks. And then the bottom half of the chart there is days in storage going from 27, which is just a bit high historically to a record of almost 54 days at the beginning of April and the March. And now we've taken a big chunk out of that in the last week down to 45 days. Again, a ways to go to get back to that traditional level in the 20s, but going the right direction. Just talking a bit about margins, they're not as strong as we need them to be, but going in the right direction. For once, part of that is due to cheaper corn. Part of that is due to higher prices, even though that's 73 cents per gallon at the wholesale level is quite low. Maybe the biggest news in terms of what's going on at the refinery is that the price for distillers has declined quite a bit. It was $200 for most of April and the last week or so it's fallen quite a bit. And that crush is 91 cents and that's on a per bushel basis. We really like to see that closer to a dollar and a quarter for things to actually look healthy, but things are kind of trending in the right direction. Looking at gasoline use and ethanol blend rate, I mean, one of the big questions going forward is are we going to continue to use the same level of gasoline we have during the month of April? Are we going to increase or are we going to decline as the economy opens back up? If you look at that first chart and that yellow line, that's your gasoline supplied on a weekly basis and we see that coming up. So this is actually supply that goes from the refiner to the wholesale level to the retail level. And so we have had a relative low a few weeks ago when we're on the upswing and that also relates in part to higher ethanol use. Again, because if you look at that lower chart, that blend rate is again just dancing around 10% like it has been for years, which is a good sign. And again, the bigger question going forward is are we going to have a continued increase in gasoline use, which will pull gas through the system or not? And that kind of remains to be seen. A lot of states are opening up today and in the upcoming weeks and we'll see how that goes and how long that's sustainable. And obviously too kind of doubling back to Brian's comments. You know, if people continue to lose their jobs, you know, there's less income, there's less need to travel and that could eat away at the upside of that gasoline use. Continue to be really out of whack in terms of supply and demand for crude oil. Basically, 1.6 million barrels a day which is 10% of what we traditionally use for crude oil. You know, that's down to 12.7 million barrels per day. Again, we're producing less. We're importing still quite a bit as some folks are still delivering. And again, it's just out of whack and that 16 million barrels a day across the week is a lot considering the storage concerns that we have. And here's my chart from where my figure that I've had the last couple of weeks basically, you know, since things have really gotten severe in mid-March and this is looking just at cushing. And again, so the working space in cushing, you know, we've gone from things being about half full to now things being 80% full which is about as high as you really wanted to get under normal conditions. And again, we've put another 25 million barrels in storage in that area. You can see that with the chart or with the graph on the right-hand side of the screen. And again, there's really not that far to go before things become unworkable again because you need some space just to move the fuel around. That's what I had for my presentation and we'll move into questions and answers. I hope that some of you have used the Q&A. If not, we'll go ahead and look at the chat. And here's our first one for Tim. Their piece appears to be a very large amount of anger within the livestock sector, laying the blame for low livestock prices on imported beef. Do you have any comments? Yeah, you know, whenever we have a bad situation like this, there's always blame and blaming packers and imports and everything else. So, you know, my message there I think is from an industry standpoint, whether it's the beef industry, pork industry or whatever, this is not a good time for us to be fighting and pointing fingers and so on. The more united we can be in helping get through this, the better we are. Actually from an import standpoint, you know, we just showed some charts on imports, but, you know, our imports are actually down. But again, you know, in some cases with our big demand for hamburger, we don't have enough here. And so we do, yes, we do get some from some other countries and, you know, that's likely to continue. So that's... Great, thanks, Tim. Are there any other questions? We're, here we go. Oh, there's been, and this looks like it's for Tim again. I quite, quite a bit of renewed interest in MPOOL. I don't know if there's anything to get fixed this. Any thoughts? Yeah, you know, there's several organizations have contacted Trump and the legislators and there are some congressmen looking that way. And so that's all to be determined in Congress. And Congress is overrun with other things right now, I think rather than that, but it's certainly one of the things that is also the investigation of Packers and all those things are on the board in Congress. So, you know, when Congress gets to it, they're probably going to look at it. Again, our previous MPOOL was deemed by the World Trade Organization as to be, you know, not appropriate. And so, you know, it would have to be written different. I guess I can say from the, for sure from the previous bill, but it's all up to Congress now and they're so busy with coronavirus that, you know, some of these things I think are maybe going to get put on the back burner. Oh, it looks like a question for Frayn. Logistics and export. What are you hearing? So far, I've not heard any disruptions or any problems based on the rail. Anything abnormal? The experts out of the ports, out of the PNW, at least for this region, have been going smoothly. We did get recently some now reports of some additional buying. China came in and bought some US soybeans for delivery in this marketing year, which is favorable for this region because of the kind of the logistical supply issues. So, I have not heard of any problems or issues showing up yet. Again, everything seems to be working smoothly. I do know in talking to a couple of the kind of elevators and processors in the region, their biggest fear right now is not necessarily supply disruption from either from the farmer or being able to get the product shipped out. It's internally with their own people getting sick because there's some rules that if you have a positive case of COVID-19, you need to shut down, you need to clean your facilities out before you can start to reopen again. And so there are some concerns about what happens if some of the employees get sick as we in particularly now move into spring's work and the peak load demand we have on labor at that time. But for shipments, it seems to be working pretty smoothly so far. Right, thanks, Fran. And just a follow-up comment on that too, that the participant had heard some problems for company shipping out of Canada. Yeah, I guess I haven't heard anything specifically shipping out of Canada. Yeah, again, I know the borders are open for transplant line because it is considered to be a prior priority issue. So even though people are not allowed to go back and forth, at least we can get product back and forth. Yeah, and then a question for me, looking at the dependency of corn price on ethanol, do you look for driving in gas uses a predictor for corn futures? Well, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a relationship. You know, we traditionally use a third of the corn crop for ethanol production. Ethanol production is declined by half. As gasoline use has increased in the last few weeks, ethanol use has gone with it. If we can see a continued recovery across the summer, which again is driving season, that will definitely be supportive of higher corn prices. It's just in many respects, really tough to tell how the motoring public will behave this summer. Will folks take longer trips? Will shelter in place and work from home tend to dominate? We really don't know. And there's a lot more too. I mean, it clearly plays a role, but one of the questions I have too is with the disruption on the livestock side, I mean, that's clearly impacting corn prices as well. And so there's a lot of different factors that have to be considered. But for me, I mean, that's definitely kind of the leading indicator. What's challenging is it's not easy to get real time information on gas use on vehicle miles traveled, which make that a little bit more difficult to track. And in fact, I mean, the best way to look at it is just to see how much gas is supplied on a week-by-week basis, which is still a trailing indicator. And if there are any more questions, as things have quieted down a little, but as we get towards the end, I'd ask if the panelists had anything they'd want that they'd like to add to their existing remarks or things that they thought of while others were speaking. One thing that I would add based on Frain's comment, a lot of those emerging trade partners and our largest ag trade partners are also very large markets for ethanol or very large targets for ethanol export market development. South Korea and the Philippines, Canada are three of our five largest markets. Brazil oftentimes as an emerging market. And then really those Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia are targets for growth. And so their relative resilience to COVID is good news. Another small piece of good news for the ethanol industry. Just to follow up, again, I want to thank everybody for participating. Again, this is going to become a, it's going to continue as a weekly program for extension agribusiness. As we've kind of moved over to this webinar license, this webinar setting, we're going to keep this same URL from week to week at the same time. So feel free to come back. The practice is a little bit different. You know, you were in a waiting room. We also had to use the Q and A tool now. And so we ask it, you know, if you're enjoying this, you're welcome back week by week or to share it with your colleagues. And as Scott pointed out in the chat, please do share your feedback with us in terms of how we're doing and what we can do better and what we can add. And so that I'd like to thank everybody for joining us this week. And we'll talk to you again next Friday. Bye.