 All right. Well, I think we'll go ahead and get started. I'd like to welcome everyone to this month's agricultural market situation and outlook webinar. We're going to have a slightly modified version today. Brian Parman has another engagement, so he won't be with us. And so we're actually going to make actually to you probably a minor change. We're just going to start with Fran, continue on with Tim with the livestock outlook and then I'll have some remarks at the end. Extra time for questions, but Fran, I believe you have to leave. I do. As well. So maybe if there's any questions for Fran, if you want to send him his way quickly, if there's time as it allows. But Fran, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you. So again, good afternoon, everybody. Fran Olson, crop economist, marketing specialist with NDSU Extension. As always, here's my contact information. So if there is something that you think about or questions you think about later or want to visit privately, be happy to do that. Just again, realize that I have a very heavy travel schedule. That's one of the reasons I've got to duck out as soon as I'm done here is to race off to another meeting. So please have a little bit of grace, give me a little bit of time to respond. I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can. So with that, let's talk about the February wazery report that literally came out about two hours ago. So I have been scrambling to try and get all my materials ready, not only for my meeting, but also for this webinar. So a couple key takeaways, kind of, these are the things that I'll be talking about today, but also that I want you to be thinking about and watching very closely. So if you look at the numbers in the wazery report, and we'll get to those in just a moment, I would view them as basically neutral for corn and wheat and slightly negative for soybeans. Now, when you look at what happened in the markets today, when you look at the futures market, you'd say, well, wait a minute, it looks from a pricing standpoint like corn and soybeans are neutral, and wheat was negative. Well, part of the problem with that is that we also had some export sales numbers that came out this morning. And I'm also going to go through some of those numbers as well to give you some perspective. And some of those export sales numbers were a little bit weak for wheat. They were a bit soft for wheat. And that's really why we have the negative tone in the wheat market today. So if you look just solely at the wazery numbers, the information that USDA gave us today, I would consider them again, neutral for corn and wheat and a little bit negative for soybeans. So again, this is all about not just what happens in USDA, but all of the other things going on in the world. So a couple of things that I'm watching very closely to get a better idea of direction for pricing, have we reached kind of a low in the marketplace? Because it seems like we kind of keep drifting lower. It looks like we're bouncing on the bottom here for a little bit. And the question farmers always ask me is, so when are we going to get that turnaround? What is it going to be that suddenly puts some life back into these marketplaces? And one of the main things that I'm watching as a key indicator for that is export sales. Now, obviously the dynamics in the corn market, the soybean market and the wheat market are slightly different. But when we look across all the classes and we look at it historically, look at it over time, our export sales are okay, but they're not really as strong as we'd like to see. And that's also kind of what's putting this negative tone in the marketplace saying, well, even though there's some issues happening globally, we're going to talk a little bit about the weather down in Brazil and Argentina. Just because there's weather problems down there doesn't mean that that's suddenly going to have an impact on US export sales. So our international buyers thinking or seeing these problems as big enough to take some more coverage to come to the US and buy some additional supplies. And so far, that really hasn't happened. Now, they're not bad sales, don't misunderstand me, but they're not necessarily strong or as strong and aggressive as we'd like to see. Very quick update on Brazilian soybean harvest, about 16% complete as of Monday, which is the most recent numbers I got. The sofrina corn crop, which is that second crop of corn. So in the north, when Brazilian farmers are harvesting their soybeans in the north, like in Mato Grosso, they come right back and start planting their corn crop, the second crop corn. First crop corn is growing right now. It'll be harvested in a little over a month. But the second crop corn is now just being planted. So because of the area of second crop corn plantings, it's not the whole country, about 27% complete on their first crop corn planting. So just to give you an idea of what the harvest and planting progress is in northern Brazil. The thing that has from a weather standpoint in South America that's really been kind of taking center stage in the marketplace or discussions about the markets is really the weather in Argentina. So up until recently, the Argentine weather for this growing season has almost been ideal. You know, in some places, almost a little bit on the wet side. So whether temperatures have been mild, they'd be getting good rain showers, they've been able to recharge some of their soil moisture. But over about the last week to 10 days, they had a real hot spell with very limited rain. And because of where the crop development is right now for both corn and soybeans in Argentina, there are some concerns and a lot of private forecasters are now starting to take kind of the top end off of the yield expectations for Argentine corn and soybean production. So they're still going to have a good crop, nothing like they had last year. Last year was a complete disaster. This year is looking much better, but it may not be quite as large as what people had first expected. Now also what I think has put a little bit of a negative tone in the markets today specifically is that the forecast for Argentina is moving forward for the next about week or so is for cooler and kind of a wetter period coming on. So even though they had a hot spell and that hot spell came at kind of an important time for corn and soybean reproduction for the pollination and flowering for soybeans, it's not necessarily going to continue. So there is going to be another weather shift. So again, not a great crop, but it's not going to be a bad crop. The final thing that I am looking at, and this is something that will probably help with the short-term lift, which is, and I've talked about this before, is what we call the net short positions for the managed hedge funds. So when we think about the investment community, the outside investors that use agricultural products as part of their portfolio, they have a couple different strategies. And one of those is as they see prices falling, as prices start dropping, what they do is they sell contracts, let the prices drift lower, and when it looks like a turn or corner has been made, then they start buying those back. So instead of buy low, sell high, they sell high and buy low. And so when we look across the board, when you look at managed hedge funds and the positions they're having, there's a lot more sellers than there have been buyers from the hedge funds. And the reason we focus on them is because they can flip their positions very, very quickly. They have large pools of money. They tend to sometimes overreact to new news. But they definitely have a very strong short position in corn, in soybeans, all of the classes of wheat, and in actually some of the soybean oil and soybean meal products as well. So there's been a lot of selling as prices have fallen. And at some point, they're going to need to reverse those positions to be able to lock in their profits and take the money away. So in my opinion, once we get this shift in attitude, and I'm not sure when that's going to occur, it is likely that we'll get a rise in the market prices that will likely be a signal to these hedge fund managers to start reversing their positions. And we will likely have that price pendulum swing a little bit further to the upside. Now, I'm not saying this is going to be a great big rally. And to be very blunt, I don't think it's going to last very long. So the window of opportunity is going to be relatively short. But everything is in from what I'm seeing, everything is setting itself up to having that kind of a short kind of a short temporary bounce in the marketplace. And again, that's the point where I'm trying to get some additional sales, especially sales for old crop inventories done. Okay, so let's look at the report itself. Like I usually do, this is the summary of not only the survey of the market analysts and private forecasters, this is the numbers that they were expecting to see in the top half. And in the bottom half is the numbers we actually got. So what I like to look at is the blue row on the very top, which is the average trade estimate. That's the number that the traders and analysts were expecting to see. The bolded black line towards the bottom is last month's numbers, the numbers that we had for ending stocks last month. And of course, the ones in red and the very bottom of the numbers we got today. So if you compare last month's numbers to this month's numbers, each one of those ending stocks increased slightly. But again, we have to look at, well, what was the trade expecting to see? So on the wheat side, we were expecting kind of a neutral report about the same numbers. We actually got a slightly larger ending stocks. And most of that ending stocks was in the food usage. So the amount of wheat going into domestic milling, that estimate dropped just a tiny bit, which then ended up increasing our ending stocks. For corn, the trade was actually expecting to see a slight reduction in ending stocks. We got a slight increase in ending stocks. Now, again, that was a little bit of a surprise. When we look at the numbers in the detail, there was no change in the ethanol forecast. There was no change in the exports number. There was no change in feed usage. But there's another category called kind of other uses, or other food seed and industrial uses. So it'd be not ethanol, but these other industrial uses or food uses we use for corn. And that number went down just a small amount. And that's therefore the reason that we had a slight increase in the corn ending stocks. For soybeans, again, the trade was expecting a slight bump or a slight increase in the soybean number. We actually got a little bit larger increase in ending stocks than we had expected. And notice, if you look at the highest trade estimate versus what we got today, we're outside of that range. And that's why I interpreted this as somewhat a negative report for soybeans. The main reason we saw that drop is actually in the exports demand, excuse me, in the demand for exports. And I'll show you some numbers in just a little bit that will probably reinforce some of those estimates or those numbers. So I do think the trade was expecting to see USDA reduce the export number a little bit, but the export number reduced a little bit larger than I think anybody was expecting. Turning to South America, and again, these are some of the numbers that we watched pretty closely. We have categories for Argentina, for Brazil, we have subcategories for corn and soybeans. For Argentina, basically no change from last month through this month. And again, USDA tends to be a little bit slow in making their adjustments for yield and yield forecast partially is because of the system they use. And I need to explain this very carefully because what USDA does is they look at the current conditions and they say, well, this is what we see today. And if we assume that the weather stays normal from this time forward, this is our best estimate of yield. So for the Argentinian crop, which is looking pretty good and the forecast longer term forecast is looking pretty normal, we really didn't see any changes. No real shock value. The industry was expecting some similar numbers. On the Brazil side, for both corn and soybeans, when we listen to the private forecasters, these private, whether they be located in the US or located in Brazil, as well as CONAB, which is the Brazilian version of USDA, their forecasted numbers for yields and total production are much lower than what USDA is suggesting. And one of the reasons is because these private forecasters are saying, well, it's really dry in parts of Brazil right now. Our assumption is that this dry weather will continue and that there will be a continued deterioration in our crop conditions and the potential yield versus the USDA process is saying, well, we see that there's a problem today, but we're going to assume that there's normal weather from here on forward. So what we typically end up happening is that that USDA forecast for total production is a little bit slower to adjust downward in particular because of drought than what you see in the private estimates. So again, when you look at these numbers, we were expecting a drop in the corn number. We got that very similar to what the trade was expecting. We were expecting a little bit larger decrease in the soybean forecast and to be very blunt, the 156 million metric ton is towards the upper range of even of the private forecasters. Most of the private guys are about a 150 or a 149. I've seen as low as 135. Again, I think the 135 might be a little bit too aggressive on the low end, but a lot of the private analysts and forecasters in that kind of 149, 150ish range. So again, USDA is on the upper end of that. So not a lot of shock value within the soybean numbers or within the South American forecasted numbers. I do want to shift to make a couple comments in the time that I have left for the exports. I do want to explain this kind of table very quickly. I'm going to repeat this for soybeans and for wheat just to give you an idea of where we are today relative to what we have been. So the four columns in the left hand side are 12 month totals for US exports. So this would be for corn. If you look at the very bottom, that would be total exports for that marketing year. Marketing year for corn and soybean starts on September 1. What's interesting about this, I've tried to break it down by country. So the country is ranked from largest to smallest based on the total export volume from 2223. So last year, Mexico was our number one export destination. These two columns on the far right hand side are a little bit different. Those are the year to date totals. And again, those numbers were updated this morning as well. So when these numbers came out, I have updated the tables to reflect the most recent information we have. And so this 2324 number would be export sales. This would be like contracts for delivery from September 1 through the 1st of February. So that's always about a week late. Okay. So now we can compare that how what's our export sales this year relative to the same time last year. So this is year to date. Last year, the far right hand's column is year to date this year. This column in 2223, that would be the 12 month total for last year. Okay. So let's just go down the list here and just say, well, which countries you're buying, are they ahead of last year's pace, behind last year's pace, what's going on? When we look at Mexico, which is typically our number one buyer, they're well ahead of the pace this, this time this year versus this time last year. And one of the main reason is because they had to drought in the core corn producing regions of Mexico. Their corn production was down a bit. They're going to be importing some more US corn. China, however, is down and down pretty hard from last year, which was down again from the year before. So this 2020 is not the record number, but it's a very large number. That was our trade, this is our trade war year at the very end of 2018, 2019 was our trade war time period. This was the phase one agreement. And then since after the phase one agreement, China's purchases of US corn has been dropping relatively rapidly and they continues to drop. Couple of reasons for that, Chinese corn production, their corn crop was larger than they, than the last couple of years. So they don't have to import as much as well as last year's corn crop coming out of Argentina was, I mean out of Brazil, excuse me, was very large. So they're buying a lot more Argentinian corn than they are US corn. Japan, Japan is back in the US market. They're buying relatively aggressively. We still have quite a few months. We got about six or seven months left of, of this marketing year. They're almost up to the pace that they were last year. Colombia, well ahead of where they were last year. Guatemala is a little bit behind, but Korea is ahead. So when we dropped in the bottom line, our corn exports are in pretty good pace right now. Okay. And if it stays at this pace, even though China is not very strong in the marketplace, you know, we'll probably come out with a number similar to what we saw last year, which is essentially what USDA is forecasting. Moving to soybeans, again, the same basic layout, 12 months totals on the left hand side, year to date totals on the two columns on the right hand side. Not a surprise. China is our number one customer for export sales for soybeans. Look at the sales pace so far. Again, last year was an okay year. This year, they're well behind the pace. Again, China is buying a lot more of their, their product from earlier in the season from, from Brazil. So last year, Brazil had a monster soybean crop by far the largest crop they've ever produced. So those, their export season lasted a little bit longer than normal. Well, now they are going to have a smaller crop coming up now that in the beginning of their harvest now. So the question I'm getting sometimes is, well, will they, will China come back in late in the season and buy a bit more soybean from the United States instead of being so heavily dependent upon Brazil? I'll get to that in one moment. I want to show you in the next graphic and try and answer that question. But if we look at the rest of our primary customers for soybeans, where do we sell soybeans? Number two is Mexico. Number three is Japan. Number four is Germany. Pretty much everybody else is kind of right in line with what we would expect to see. And it's because of this lack or slow pace of Chinese buying that now USDA is saying, well, this export season is probably not going to be as good as last year's season. Okay. And, and one of the reasons is this timing issue. Okay. So this is weekly export sales and every, every different line is a different year. So if you look down at the bottom, the different colors mean different marketing years. The red line is where we are today. And again, this is as of the information we got this morning. So if you notice that we, most of our export sales, most of the kind of the amount of grain or soybean that we sell for export occurs just basically starting just before harvest and runs through about the end of February. By the end of February, the Brazilian crop is starting to be harvested. It's starting to hit the international market. And a lot of those international buyers, including Japan or excuse me, including China, start to buy from the Brazilian crop. So the question I'm getting is, well, if we have a slow start to the season, like we did this year, is there the potential to pick up more of the pace later on in the season? And my challenge is I don't think we're going to be able to make up the difference. We'll still have some export sales. We're still going to have some customers that buy from the United States. But as long as that Brazilian crop is not a complete disaster, they should have enough soybeans to supply most of the needs going into China. So we're still going to have in my opinion, some pretty stiff competition shifting to wheat. I've got one for all wheat. And I got one from spring wheat. And then we'll wrap things up. And if they answer any questions you might have. So on the wheat side, and again, this is kind of the challenge we're having in the wheat industry, especially for hard red winter wheat, is our export sales for hard red winter wheat are just a little bit slower than last year, in particular for hard red. So if we look at this is all wheat blended together, I just want to be careful. Mexico pretty much right on pace. Japan a little bit behind last year's pace. Philippines a little bit ahead of last year's pace. Korea pretty much right where they're at. Now, China is definitely ahead of the pace. And that's one of the only reasons we've had such a good export season in US wheat. The challenge we're having is most of that crop, most of those export sales have been soft red winter wheat. That's not been hard red winter wheat. It's not been spring wheat. China has bought a little bit of spring wheat, but very, very little. So if we drop down to the bottom, you know, yeah, our export season looks like it's going to be a little bit ahead of last year at least at this pace, which isn't bad, but last year was not a very good export season. And to be very honest, one of the only reasons we're having this kind of season or sales is because of these larger purchases for soft red winter wheat. And again, some concerns about, well, are the Chinese going to shift to other sources now that there's other sources available, for example, some Argentinian wheat or some Australian wheat. And it looks as though that's starting to happen. Finally, just talking about spring wheat, just to give you an idea, the spring wheat sales are actually a little bit more optimistic. The Philippines, our number one customer is ahead of last year. Mexico is well ahead of last year's pace. I think we'll have some really good sales into Mexico this year. And then the rest of the countries like Japan, Taiwan, Korea are pretty much right on pace. So our two biggest customers, Philippines and Mexico are buying larger more aggressively this year than they have last year. And that is helping us in the spring wheat market. But again, we're coming off some relatively low numbers. So with that, I will stop sharing and see if there's any quick questions that have come up. And then I will hand things over to Tim. They're asking you a question, explain net short position and why that's a headline now. Okay, so net short position. So very quickly. So when the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is the organization, the government agency that regulates futures trading, they make sure that the electronic trading that's going on is fair, that nobody's cheating and nobody's trying to manipulate markets. And they watch that exceptionally close, by the way. But every Friday, they put out a report that summarizes the positions, whether they're long, meaning they've bought futures contracts or whether they're short, meaning they have sold futures contracts for these big different categories of traders. So we have the commercial traders which are like farmers and elevator managers and exporters where they're actually buying and selling physical grain as well as buying and selling futures market contracts. Well, we have this class of traders called the hedge funds or the speculative hedge funds. And the reason we focus on those guys so much is they have huge pools of money. They tend to come in and buy and sell in very large quantities. They don't do anything in a small way. And they can flip their positions very, very quickly. Now in that pool of hedge fund managers, there are some that are, believe, prices have bottomed and will go up. And of course, there's some that see prices are falling, they think it will continue to fall. So we always have, you know, again, people that are buying or people that are selling. Well, net short, if you look at that, all the people, all the traders in that big bucket of called hedge fund managers, there's more contracts that have been sold than there have been bought back. Okay, so that pool of people, because they can flip their positions so quickly, are watched pretty closely because when they make their, when they change their mind, there tends to be kind of a herd mentality. When they change their mind and start shifting their positions, so if they have sold sold sold sold for a long time, there's more sellers than buyers, all of a sudden to be able to get back to a neutral position. Or if they sell high, let the prices fall and then buy back at a low level, they want to lock in that profit. So if we have a lot of people that have sold in that bucket, and they tend to flip their positions very quickly, that means that if prices start to rise, we will likely see these hedge fund guys come back and say, okay, I'm going to lock in my profit, I'm going to start buying. And in the whole system, if you have more buyers and sellers in the whole marketing system, prices tend to rise. And that's why there's a lot of market analysts and it's one of the things that I follow to get a general idea of kind of the direction that we may be headed next. Okay, it looks like there might be one more question. Is that number of net short positions a running week over week tally, or is the net short number a sum of trading for that particular week? Know that so when they report that, they report it by commodity. And in fact, if you want to get really deep into the weeds, you can separate it out by futures positions versus options positions. And what is the March versus the May versus the July, but the numbers that I'm quoting and the numbers that most people look at is just, what is the position in all of the contracts for soybeans? What's the position for all the contracts in wheat? What's the positions for all the contracts in corn? Okay, so that is net short positions as a running total. So it's not just the change from week to week to week, it's the total number of contracts. So hopefully that answered your question. Okay, with that guys, I appreciate your patience. I'm sorry it took me so long to try and answer and talk through all of that. But I will hand things over to Tim because I need to get to my next meeting. Okay, thanks Fran. Good afternoon, everybody. Tim Petrie, extension livestock marketing economist. Just going to talk a lot today about the cattle inventory report that came out on January 31st. The WASDE report does not affect livestock very much other than USDA did raise their price projection for fed cattle. But anyway, last week or last month, I should say, I showed you this chart on the top is the January 1st, US beef cows going back 20 years there. And you know, USDA said a year ago, January 1st, 2023, we were at 28.92 million. We were pretty convinced that that would be down. So you see in the purple there on the left hand side, middle, my guess was just that, you know, let's throw out 28.3 is a number for this January 1st that USDA might come up with. I said, you know, it could be lower than that as dry as it was and so on. But let's use that as a guide. So here are the numbers. Again, we expected numbers to be down. And so here's, you know, 2022, 2023, and then the new ones for 2024. And I'm not going to go through all of these, but just spend a little bit more time on a few of them on the right hand side, anything in red then is down. So you see a lot of 2% down. The only one category down at the bottom, and I'll talk more about that in a minute, is the total cattle on feed was actually up and some very good reasons for that. So let's go back up here to beef cows then. The USDA came in at 28.22 million cows. And so again, we were really close in what we thought that would be down 2.5%, very supportive to prices. And then the other category, if you go down to heifers and then below heifers is beef replacement heifers, I want to explain that a little bit. Actually, the numbers that I show you on the charts, they give one number, but it's actually two different crops of replacement heifers. The total beef replacement heifer category was 4.858 million. And however, those expected to calf, that would be on January 1st, bread heifers that will have a calf was 3.0 million. So the difference then would be the lighter calves born this year that are 4.556, 700 pound calves now that haven't went in with a bull yet. And the problem with this number is from USDA trying to estimate is that it can change quite a bit since January 1st, because for one thing, those heifers that are bred that have a calf, to have a calf, some of those lose their calves and then they get sold so they don't end up in the stream. And then the other category would be the heifer calves that we're just saving back now. And more on that when we get to looking at the actual numbers, that's an elusive number because they haven't even went in with a bull yet. And we might on this survey, when producers fill that out, they may have replacement heifers that they think they're going to put in with a bull, but it's dry, but they don't. On the other hand, if it's really raining and good moisture conditions like the improvement that we've seen here in the last few months, they could actually decide to keep more of the heifers that they maybe were going to sell and actually put them in with the bull. So because of that, then USDA does go back the previous year and revise, and I'll show you those revisions in a minute down to the bottom then, and I'll explain that in more detail too. You see everything is down and we'll see that the cattle herd has been down five years and yet we had more cattle on feed and every, you know, a lot of those hedge funds like Frane was mentioning are very, very nervous about having more cattle on feed because they say, well, USDA missed the numbers before and all that, and that isn't the case at all because it can easily be explained. One, just the category below that, the supply of cattle outside feedlots is down the most of any. And just what happened, it was really, really dry particular in the southern plains this summer and cattle that, you know, would have stayed on grass and winter wheat grazing and so on actually went into feedlots earlier. And then the other thing is that heifer category that I just talked about. And a lot of heifers that we, as we'll see in a minute, a lot of heifers that we had intended to breed did not get bred and they went into feedlots. And so that's why we have more cattle on feed. So the report is very positive for prices into the future. However, that cattle on feed, a number is going to keep a little bit of lid on particularly unfed cattle in the next month or two, until we work through them. And then, you know, we're expecting cyclically higher prices again. So, you know, here's just the reason why we have more cattle on feed on the upper right hand corner is the purple line is 2022. And then the blue line is last year. And then that red dot in the upper left hand corner is this year. But we actually starting in October and then into November and December went above last year for those reasons that I talked about dry weather, more cattle coming off of pastures and going into the feedlot. And that red shows that again, now over the blue line last year, we're above. Go below then the chart below, you see that we actually have a record number of heifers on feed now. And some of those potentially we're going to go in with a bull and they didn't end up with a bull. So we got a lot of heifers on feed. And then in the upper left hand corner, I showed you the number, but here's the chart, you know, a lot of cattle went into the feedlot. And so they're not available to go into the feedlot where that green line is circled there. So that's very positive for prices in that that feedlots in order to stay full are going to really have to scramble for cattle, because we've got a lot less than we've had less than anywhere on that chart, you see of cattle that to be sold this summer and go on. And so that's, you know, it's nothing to be concerned about, it's just something that happened, weather, all weather related. So then on the top then is our new chart for January 1st for US cattle. And you see there, you know, our peak number cyclically was back in 2019 at 31.7 million. Last year we were at 28.9, which was actually below what it was back in 2014, the last time we had record high prices. And now we've had five years of liquidation, unlike going from 2010 to 2014, that four year decline because it was the same reason, drought all over particular in the Southern Plains. So we've got a small color. And I know the press is hyping up, it's a 50 year low or something. Don't worry about that, because we still are producing a lot of beef, way, way more beef than we did 50 years ago with fewer cows, because the cows have gotten bigger and so on. And then down on the replacement heifer side, you see also because of the drought and so on, we've got a low number of replacement heifers there, 4.9 million last year and down to 4.86 this year. Again, very, very low numbers. But I'm going to show you a little bit about the revisions that USDA did make here next after we talk about North Dakota. So here's the North Dakota numbers actually North Dakota numbers peak cyclically in 2020. So they went up one more year than we did in the US. But the last four years we've declined again by the end of 2020, we were really dry. 2021 most of North Dakota was dried out and had dry. And so we went from last year, 876 million beef cows down 16,000 there to 860. And so, you know, a less of a decline in the US. And again, our moisture conditions up here were better, particularly West River this year than the Southern Plains. And then on the bottom replacement heifers actually in North Dakota, we recorded some more replacement heifers than we ended up having last year. So you know, again, the better weather up here, some interest in keeping some more replacement heifers. But again, there were revisions that we need to talk about here. So like I said, because of all the moving target and that that some cow beef, some heifers that are bred to calf, they have and lose their calves. So then they go to market so they don't show up on this January 1. And then the other thing is those lighter weight calves in the fall how many we keep. So actually, you see that where that circle is, the left hand bar was what USDA a year ago said that we had for beef replacement heifers there at 5.2 million head. But actually, then they went back and revised it and say we only have 4.9 million head is actually what ended up this January 1 compared to what it was last because some of them didn't win with a bowl and get bread and went into feed lots as we know, all those on feed and so on. And so that's what happened in the US. And same thing down in on the bottom chart in North Dakota, they revised the numbers for last year down 5,000 head that as you see up on top, they revised US numbers 234 million or 234,000 head down. So we reduced ours a little more down as well, a 5,000 head compared to what we thought. So last year, then they said we had 157 million actually now the new report, but we're going to be up to the 163. So maybe probably a lot more than you wanted to know, but you know, USDA isn't wrong. It's just that they have to go back and adjust when the producers in the US and North Dakota change their plans. And so, you know, talking a little bit more about that, here's the market report from last week for the markets reported in North Dakota. Again, that's Napoleon, Mandan and Dickinson. So on the right hand side, you see your heifers and I'm not going to go through all these prices and so on, but you see those, those market reporters are there on the right hand side are reporting all those heifers bringing higher prices that they call replacement heifers. So, you know, the question there is when the producers that own those calves on January 1st, you know, these are heifers that they weren't keeping for themselves because they sold. So did they call these replacement heifers or did they just call the ones that they were themselves going to put in with the bull? That's again, what USDA struggles with. And so, you know, by next year, they might revise our replacement heifers up if the weather continues like it is, you know, two years ago, we were in 76% of the coward was in drought. Now it's down to only 18%. So there is interest in herd rebuilding. And so, you know, heifers are our replacement heifers are bringing really good prices there where that bottom arrow is going back 750 to 800 pounds steers last week average 251 the top was 261 50 but there look you've got 794 heifers bringing above even the highest steers at 264. So, you know, that means there is interest in herd rebuilding and and and and somebody at least our our after replacement heifers and it might be an indication maybe that if it keeps raining that we that we do end up with more. But again, in you know, in North Dakota, we're only a couple a week of hot, windy weather from kind of being in drought. So that's going to all play into that. So, you know, here's our 550 to six weight steer calves. And again, you know, we were $80 higher last year right now up there, the average last year as you saw in the previous chart, if you took a look at that up to 310 $90 higher than they were last year, again, very much supported by the by the lower numbers, then record I fed cattle prices, I didn't bring that chart. And and so, you know, doing very, very well there again and we expect them to cyclically be higher than they were last year. The same thing on the heavier weight yearlings, we're just, you know, up $60 or so where they were last year, there's the futures market today indicating that we're going to have higher prices throughout the year this year, which we would agree with cyclically because again, we're going to have numbers you saw, we've got fewer cattle outside feedlots. So feedlots are going to have to scramble for those fewer feeder cattle as we go throughout the summer. Corn is the big wildcard here, you know, again, change corn 10 cents change calf braces, a buck in the opposite direction. So our corn isn't even in the bin yet. And so a lot of things can happen here, but you know, that's kind of the story. Same thing on beef, cold cows, again, fewer of them we expect fewer to be cold this year with the great improvement in moisture that we've had throughout the US. And we've had high cow slaughter last year that you've heard me talk about before. And so a cold cow prices are doing very well. I keep getting questions about bread heifers and bread cows, actually the one market class of cattle that is not record high. And is is is bread heifers and bread cows are not as high as they were in 2014 15, unlike the others fed cattle and all feeder cattle are higher. And then, you know, there are good reasons for that interest rates are higher. You know, we aren't that far out of drought. People remember back to 2014 and in 15 when we had a rapid build up in numbers and and that. And so there's some cautious out there. But, you know, I'm not promoting Stockman's over any other auction or anything else. But what I like, you know, what we're wanting to know is, you know, our prices for bread cattle higher this year, and we would expect them to be higher with the higher calf prices. And so this is just kind of a guide that I use. The one reason I use Stockman's is because they put all the information on the website and they have sales the same time every year and go back and put the information from the previous year there so you can compare. So this was last week's bread cow sale up in the upper left corner. You see young cows averaged a little over $2,500 but a wide range due to quality 1925 up to over $3,000. And, and you know, the same thing over and on on bread heifers, but bread heifers averaging about $2,570 and and young stock cows about a little over $2,500 and again go down to the solid mouth cows a little over $2,000 then the short term broken mouth cows at $1,700. But, you know, if we compare the two across then go down to the bottom again just exactly a year ago Stockman's had a sale. And so the young cows last year averaged $1,796 compared to 2507 so they're up about $700 go over to bread heifers the same thing up about $700 and come back to the left end solid mouth cows again a little over $700 in the short term cows over their $600 so you know you could say as of now you know we're at six to probably a good average there might be $700 higher than last year but I I think that certainly is expected given the the higher calf prices. So with that I'm going to stop share and turn it over to well I guess we can take questions at the end so I'll turn it over to you Dave. Sounds good thanks Tim. And I just have a few remarks this month just talking a little bit about what's going on renewable diesel it's definitely continuing to grow in terms of volumes and consumption of egg products but a few surprising things behind the numbers at least to date. So this is a chart that I've shown before updated for the third quarter numbers which just came out last week and we're continuing to see these renewable diesel sales rise again it was a year ago in January that we saw renewable diesel sales surpass traditional diesel sales in California this these numbers on a quarterly basis and that's really continued strongly see the slope of the line being quite steep through the end of October. Interestingly you can see that little bump in the in the gray line that diesel use actually did rise as well which I don't think many people were necessarily expecting but renewable diesel sales still exceed that and then the last thing to look at is that bio diesel remain flat or close to flat during that quarter but looking just a little bit deeper into those numbers we can actually see the changes that are taking place and it's somewhat difficult to understand the magnitude of these volumes but just in the last quarter renewable diesel use in in terms of volume was up a little over 10 percent so 50 million gallons and so if you think about that that's the size of a about the size of a spirit wood or a blue flint ethanol refinery so a massive amount think about adding that within the quarter but if we go over the last year it's actually been 180 million gallons which is like the size of theraldson you know major a major increase and then to just think we're continuing on this trajectory going forward so a lot of renewable diesels being used so it's obviously being made to me what's surprising is the composition of the feedstocks being used at least to date with what we thought was going to happen and then expectations of the future so if we look at these numbers these are also from california air resources board this is feedstock used and so for quite a long time it was tallow used cooking oil has had a large role but soybean is actually hasn't done what we thought it was going to do again with that rapid growth obviously going from zero two years ago to to a relatively largeable contribution relative to others we're still nowhere close to where the market's getting position to go in terms of additional crush and additional renewable diesel capacity coming online and if you actually look closely at the numbers soybean oil used was actually down for the quarter so we use less last quarter than we did in q2 and so here's just some more specific numbers for that so that soybean oil used for renewable diesel used in california was down 15 at the same time if we look at the entire year it's still up by 50 and really i think going forward we know that soybean oil is going to play a huge role in this and other renewable diesel markets and then when sustainable aviation fuel takes off it'll likely play upon there right likely play a large role in that as well but really to date we haven't seen those physical volumes move into this market specifically to me it kind of brings up a question of what else were or are we continuing to use a lot of soybean oil nationally and unfortunately we have some good data collected by eia but before i get into that i have a quick little quiz for everybody so nationally so biomass based diesel so that's renewable diesel and biodiesel what are the most commonly used feedstocks by volume so i covered those used for renewable diesel so far but the ones that we use nationally might be a bit surprising and that's kind of why i covered this if you want to take a second and maybe just jog your memory of what i just spoke about for california or if you have additional knowledge or thoughts about this you can you can take a stab obviously we're not asking anybody to record this but it is it's very interesting what is going on so here's the chart without the labels and so we have a variety of feedstocks these are those collected by eia so the first one which shouldn't be surprising is soybean oil by far the biggest feedstock in terms of volume used also note though i mean it did have that really big dip so it's continuing to be the number one feedstock for biodiesel by quite some measure but its use was down coming actually into harvest and a little bit beyond because this data actually goes through november so that should be the easy one and then i'm going to give you some of the other ones that are somewhat easy so you should know tallow so tallow has long been the go-to for renewable diesel and since that's such a big market i talked about it previously if you remember the size of the dot you know that kind of makes sense corn oil follows closely and so most of that corn oil is primarily coming from ethanol refineries you know we have been extracting corn oil from them really quite efficiently for some time i was visiting with a technology company earlier this week and the yields for corn corn oil extraction have almost doubled from when they started doing it where you're looking at seven seven tenths of a pound to 1.4 pounds per bushel which is you know to me is absolutely astounding but the folks are i was talking to i mean they have the technology to break up different biological pieces in the smaller ones which has allowed that corn oil extraction to to be possible canola actually likes that a lot of canola does go into biodiesel production its pathway was only recently approved for renewable diesel so it's working its way into that market but then of course the last one and that like the the not necessarily gotch but maybe a gotcha is this yellow grease and so this is the same as used cooking oil according to the the shared definitions loosely speaking but it's important to note the role that it's played as well as the growth that we've seen in its use for biofuel and then if you remember a few months ago if you follow regularly there's a lot of concern that the rapid increase in imports of yellow grease for these biofuel markets hasn't actually been yellow grease and that it's they're fraudulent products that are being brought into the country and that's kind of the the subject of a big investigation but again if you look now today at who's contributing physically to this market soybean oil is there but it's actually yellow grease and again this is the definition is that basically you're going to deep fry something and that's the grease that's left over tallow for for beef fat and then corn and canola oil which we're familiar with but i find that really interesting the other thing that i find interesting is that rapid increase in beef tallow use i'm trying to get to the bottom of that i'm doing a little bit of work tallow exports have declined significantly as you'd expect i haven't found good tallow import numbers but going from a place even just a year ago we're using a large amount of that for for biofuel production and to see it almost double over the course of a couple of quarters is pretty surprising and i think that's what i had and i did not update our our webinar for next month um but i want to thank everybody uh we'll hang on for just a second here if there are any questions um but that does officially conclude uh the prepared remarks for today and so if you have any questions for me or tim we'd be happy to happy to visit with you and i'll quick look up our our next uh time so we can get that to you correctly yeah and it will be the it's the 14th of march for for our next event there happen to be any questions we were we were we're gonna reward you with a shorter webinar this week obviously brian could make it it's a short month so you get a slightly shorter uh webinar oh that's a good question yeah so my yeah so my my email is david dot ripplinger at ndsu.edu uh feel free to send me an email you can also give me a call if you've ever liked to chat i'm happy to to visit about biofuels and related issues i think there's one there for tim yep yep and tim you have one as well um when do you expect heifers to begin being retained for herd expansion oh and you're on mute tim well they are being retained now and they are in north dakota and and it all depends on rain but they you know like i said only 18 percent of the color is in drought now so they we are starting to retain heifers the problem is the heifers that we are retaining uh are the heifer crops from this year for from last last year and so they will go in with a bull this summer maybe if we have enough and they won't have a calf till the next year so it's going to be a slow slow process for herd rebuilding because the number of heifers expected to have of course are low as a leftover from last year but we there are more heifers being retained we know that now alright thanks tim well if there are no more questions i'd like to thank everybody presented today and everybody who attended again we'll be back in march on the 14th uh again at one o'clock so i hope everybody has a great uh February day and hopefully we don't live too too long in this land of rain and ice thanks