 Well, good afternoon and welcome to this week's edition of the egg market situation outlook presented by India Sioux Extension. Once again, we'll have a series of presentations about the current situation in egg markets and otherwise and in some respects is impacted by COVID. With that, we'll hand it over to Brian Parman. All right. Thanks, Dave. Today, I'm going to be a little bit all over the place, it may seem, but if you'll bear with me, I'll kind of try to tire all together. But talking about some of the macro stuff again, and then I'm going to dig into some North Dakota farm management data. So one of the things that's going on right now that folks are worried about is a second flare-up of COVID or another spike in taxing hospital beds as states begin to reopen and more and more businesses are opening and folks going back to work. So my first slide shows the number of tests per thousand people. And you can see back in March, we had basically zero. And now we're conducting thousands and thousands of tests. And as you can imagine, the more testing you do on this, the more infected folks that you're going to turn up. I mean, that just makes sense. And they're doing a lot more testing of people who maybe never had symptoms or didn't show any symptoms, who test positive. So really the number of positive tests in and of itself isn't the issue or isn't what folks are so worried about. But what my next slide shows is the number of positive tests per test conducted. And you can see that that's starting to increase. So that trend had been going down, down, down. And when you think about it logically, it's pretty simple. Most folks, back when this all started, most folks who went to the hospital were very sick, you had to meet a certain criteria of symptoms to get tested because tests were expensive. They took several days. It was pretty cumbersome. So you really had to meet a lot of these benchmarks in order for somebody to conduct a test on you. Well, as we did more and more testing on folks who maybe didn't have all the symptoms or any symptoms at all, you see the positive rate went way down. So we're still doing more tests. We're still testing more, but then you see this positive rate actually increasing there toward the right. And that is causing, if you've looked at the market today, why the stock market is so far down, and other states where these big hot spots and flare ups are occurring, are slowing their reopen and maybe even discussing some further restrictions. And this is what we were talking about months ago when we discussed reopening is how we're going to react if and when the infection rate started increasing, not the number infected, but the infection rate. And that's what we're seeing and we'll be watching very closely on how this transpires going forward. And the epidemiologists type experts and stuff are really worried about what happens during flu season, October, when if COVID is occupying a bunch of hospital beds, what's going to happen when people start getting sick with our seasonal viruses that tend to happen? So that's what's on everyone's mind. That's what we're watching for. And we'll have to wait and see how this all transpires and affects the economy in general. But back to the unemployment stuff, as I've been saying every single week, pretty much initial jobless claims has pretty much flattened out actually. It's just over a million folks per week are filing new unemployment claims. We've seen that for the last several weeks in a row and it seems to be slowing, but it's still extremely high. And if you look at the weekly continuous jobless claims, which is on my next slide there, it's flattened out as well. So a lot of folks are going back to work, but we have a lot of people who are being laid off. Some of these companies, there's a delayed impact on these businesses that thought maybe they were going to be able to make it through to the other side and didn't. So you're getting still getting a lot of layoffs and terminations. But some folks are continuing to go back to work. But this is still an extremely high number, you know, 18, 19 million people out of work as opposed to just a couple of million before this all started. So it's still an extremely high number. But so far it's been trending down a little bit as states reopen. But again, going back to that reinfection or not reinfection, but a number of infected protests going up, that may impact this quite a bit and how it all happens. It's going to depend on the actions that the states take. So I'm going to shift gears here next and talk some about some of our farm business management data. And one of the things that as we look at 2019, which is at the far right hand side of the chart, it was basically the second worst year in the last 10 with 2015 being the only year worse than 2019, for the most part. It was a pretty tough year. You can look there average, the average of all farm net farm income was pretty low. And that's despite a very large government program payment in the form of MFP in 2019, which is included in the net farm income. So in 2015, there wasn't that to help out most of the program payments were from crop programs like Arc and PLC. Whereas in 2019, we had this massive MFP payment. And yet still, it was pretty, pretty tough year 2018. You'll recall, yes, we had an MFP, but net farm incomes were higher. The MFP was lower, but commodity prices for the first six months of the months of the year for the most part in 2018 were quite a bit better. So my next chart chart just shows some profitability measures. And again, looking at 2019, the rate of return on equity, extremely low state average, almost zero. Again, not quite as bad as 2015, which was negative. And then the rate of return on assets very low in 2019, as opposed to you look at the first part of the decade, rate of return on assets and equity up in the double digits, even 25% in 2012, which was a really banner year for North Dakota. But 2019, pretty tough year and certainly worse than 2018. So just how important have government payments been? And the tables I show next are a big part of that. And if you look, the left column shows gross cash income. Crop government payments would be like your Arc and PLC, CRP, and then other government payments MFP and disaster type payments. So in 2018, the state average was $60,200 per farm with a net farm income of 116,000. So government payments were about 50% of North of 50% of a net farm incomes in North Dakota in 2018. If we'd look at 2019, though, the next slide, it shows how big MFP went up to $68,000. Other payments in MFP, $68,000, which is a huge chunk in total government payments of $86,569 as a state. So in other words, government assistance, CRP type stuff was over 100% of net farm income for the state. So in other words, without that, state average would be underwater by almost $12,000 per farm. So that's just how impactful and how big and important these disaster MFP and other payments have been for our state for the last couple of years. And even the high 20% in terms of net farm income, their total government payments was over 50% of their net income. So that's just a big number to put into perspective what's been going on with these market facilitation programs and then the CARES Act that was put forth and how big of an impact that's going to wind up having when we have some of the 2019 numbers or 2020 numbers. Okay. So my next slide, my next chart shows the projections from FAPRI. And I apologize that it's a little bit fuzzy. I took it straight from FAPRI and the projected 2020 net farm income for the US is $90 billion. And they're projecting 2021 to be around that $79 billion, almost $80 billion mark. So a big drop in 2021 from 2020. And the difference is direct government payments. That's that underlined row there on the chart. $32.8 billion FAPRI is projecting in direct government payments for 2020 by far the largest of ever and substantially bigger by almost $10 billion compared to 2019. So it seems like the FAPRI is projecting additional relief this year. And then a big decline in 2021 being lower and that explains why they expect the big drop in net farm income. Crops and livestock payments income being a little bit higher in 2021. But again, you cut go from $32.8 billion as a country down to 16.6 and direct government payments. And that makes a huge impact on net farm income going forward. And that's kind of what they're saying there is that the government assistance next year will be much less than this year and the previous couple years so far. And one last note, one last chart I just wanted to quickly cover something interesting in the data is if you look at this chart it shows how much the average farm has in share rent, cash rent and owned land. In 2019 saw a big spike in cash rented ground. It went from about 1462 acres per farm to 1608. It had been trending up and owned land had been trending down for many years. But we see in 2019 a big uptick in cash rented ground. Some of that could be a function of the data who came into the program and who left. But for an increase that much on average there had to be, it seems like a lot more folks are taking on additional land to farm last year in the form of cash rented ground which I thought was pretty interesting. A slight uptick in owned land, not huge but big enough. And the cash rented ground increase. So when we start talking about when will cash rents go down, when will go down to reflect commodity prices as something that they don't right now. Well you look at this chart here and you see why they haven't. If cash rented ground continues to increase and people continue to be willing to pay for it, farmers competing for it, well there's really no incentive for it to drop and so that's kind of where we stand right now. So with that I'll go ahead and turn it over to Dr. Frane Olson. Thank you. All right good afternoon everybody. This week I'd like to provide a little bit of an update on some new information we're going to get from USDA coming next week. So on Tuesday next week June 10th or excuse me June 30th, excuse me, USDA is going to release both the acreage report and the grain stocks report. And so this week I thought I'd give you a little bit of a preview of what is the market expecting out of those reports and kind of the impact it might have on the supply and demand balance sheets as we move forward. So on my first slide I just want to give you a little bit of background on how these reports compiled and then I'll talk a little bit about how the information is used. So the grain stocks report is conducted every three months. So it's a quarterly report. They do a USDA as a survey of both farmers as well as what we call commercial operators. So they have both an on farm stocks number as well as an off farm stocks number. The on farm stocks is again farmer owned, typically farmer owned. It's what is on the farm as of the date. We're going to have the June 1 report released next Tuesday. So what happens is USDA surveys about 79,900 farmers and ask them how much grain do you have on inventory on your farm on that particular day. They also conduct a survey of the commercial operators or of commercial grain storage facilities that's called the off farm stocks. Again, because grain storage facilities have to be certified, they have to be certified and bonded. We have a list of those and so there's approximately 8,400 facilities across the US. Each one of them is contacted and asked, all right, how much do you have on inventory as of June 1. So when we look at these inventory numbers, they're going to be pretty accurate and I'll explain a little more detail how the market uses this, how USDA uses this information. The one, the report that will likely get the most interest that will be of greatest concern to the marketplace is going to be the acreage report. So acreage report is really updates that March 31 perspective plantings report. So if you remember back in March, USDA sent out surveys to farmers and said, what do you intend to plant this year? We know things can change depending upon weather conditions and relative prices, but what are your plans? What's your thinking right now today? Well, the acreage report is a follow-up survey to that where farmers are resurveyed and asked, well, what did you actually plant? And so again, this becomes our reference point for calculating how much production or our expectation for total production, how many bushels produced are in the United States. So again, USDA surveys approximately 68,100 farms or farmers, they conducted during the first two weeks of June. Now by the time we get to first two first weeks of June, usually the crop is completely planted. Now again, in previous sessions I've talked a little bit about the plant problems we're having here in North Dakota and the fact that there are some farmers that were pretty dramatically behind in their planting progress. So some of those acres may not be fully captured, but the way the question is asked is how many acres did you plant or intend to plant? Okay, so it hopefully will capture and be relatively accurate even for North Dakota. But for the rest of the country, most of the rest of the country had finished their planting progress by the first couple weeks of June. So on my next slide, this is the estimates. So before these reports come out, major news agencies like Reuters or Bloomberg do surveys of the major private forecasting firms and some of the larger market analysis firms or analyst firms and say what do you expect this number to be? What would your number be? And they survey those folks, they compile the results of that survey because this really gives us kind of an insight on what is the market thinking the numbers will look like. So for the June 1 stocks report on the very top row highlighted in black, the bolded black is the average of the 26 firms that reported to answer the survey. It's broken down by all wheat, corn and soybeans. And really to think about this, we need to compare that number both to what is the range, the highest number versus the lowest number, kind of how wide or how variable is the estimates within the industry. But also, what are our reference points not only from last year, which is the June 1, 2019 that highlighted blue line, but also the previous quarter, which was the March 1, 2020 number. So again, there's two different ways of thinking about this. One is let's look back and say, what do we expect to see in today's report or the report next week relative to last year at this time period? And if you look at the blue line versus the bolded black line, you notice that in all cases for all major classes, wheat, corn and soybeans, the expectation is our inventories will be lower. So it looks like we're starting to take some of these inventories down, at least that's the expectation. The other way of thinking about it, and this is typically the way not only USDA, but some of the private forecasting firms look at, is we look at the green line going across that highlighted green line, which is the March 1. So that was the survey results for the inventory on March 1. Let's compare that to the survey results on June 1. And we have that three month block of time. So if you subtract those two numbers, it gives us an idea or at least a reference point on how fast are we using up our inventories? How fast are we burning through our available stocks? Now, for wheat and for soybeans, those numbers are really a way to kind of validate to make sure we're on the right track. Because we have other methods, other surveys that USDA does to try and cross check the usage, both for exports and domestic use for wheat and soybeans. But for corn, it becomes a lot more challenging because one of our major uses for corn, as I've noted in some of the previous recordings or videos, is the livestock sector. It goes into the feed sector. And trying to monitor the quantity of feed or the quantity of corn going into the livestock sector as feed is a really, really difficult task. We can follow and track exports because we get weekly updates there. We can get a pretty good estimate of how much is going into the ethanol industry based upon the ethanol production numbers. And Dave Ripplinger has talked about that. We can kind of back calculate and find out how much corn is being consumed. But really that feed number becomes the residual. So we'll look at that three months time differential. We'll subtract out what the exports are, subtract out what went into the ethanol industry, or at least an estimate. And whatever's remaining either was spoilage and wastage, which is kind of this residual piece, or it went into the livestock sector at some point. So again, given all the changes now that we've had in adjustments that we've had in livestock, and Tim Petrie has talked a lot about that, you know, this feed number gets to be a little bit softer. It gives you a little more fuzziness on how fast we chewing up the corn crop. And so again, this survey, this grain stocks report is going to be watched, saying, well, are we on track to meet the yearly totals or not? The next slide, it does the same thing for the acreage number. Again, this is a survey of 20, in this case, 28 different firms responded. Again, private forecasters or larger grain or market analysis firms and say, what do you think the planted acreage will be? And so again, I want to compare that top row, which is the average of the 28 firms. And you can see also, when you look at the highest reported value and the lowest reported value for both corn and soybeans, that's a pretty wide range of estimates. So there's still quite a bit of uncertainty, regarding how many acres of corn and soybeans actually got planted. For the wheat and the wheat complex, it's not as uncertain, mainly because all the winter wheat had already been seeded. We've got a bit more information about winter wheat seedings and how many acres got planted. For spring wheat and Durham, there's still a little bit of uncertainty and you can see the ranges percentage-wise are a little bit wider again. But what the market's going to be looking at is that black row, which is again, this is what the average trader is thinking the USDA report will tell us, versus the blue row, which again was the information that came from the survey on March 31. So one more time on the acreage reporting, what USDA is doing is they're not trying to forecast planted acreage. What they're trying to do is survey farmers and compile that survey information, say, this is what farmers are telling us they did. So I want to be really careful about distinguishing between a USDA forecast versus what farmers are actually saying. So if we look at those numbers, the average trade guess is that the corn plantings, the number of corn acres planted, will drop about 1.8 million acres. That'd be about a 1.2 million acre increase in soybeans. And then some slight tweaks or slight adjustments for the winter, wheat, spring, wheat and durum. So right now, the markets, the futures market we're looking at, has these numbers kind of built into it for expectations. So when the report comes out, the fact that it's again potentially will be lower for corn is not really the issue. The question is, everybody's expecting it to be lower. So how much lower will it be? How would these change in planted acreage? How would that impact our expectations for the bottom line? How much not only corn are we going to produce? Soybeans we're going to produce this year, but then also what will that do to the potential ending stocks, the amount of inventories that we're going to have available? This is the corn supply demand balance sheet. This is from the June report, June 11th report. So this is the most recent forecast for not only production, but also usage for corn for the 2020-2021 marketing year. So that's the column in blue on the far right hand side. So that's the crop that's just been planted. That's the crop that's growing in the field right now. The middle column, the 2019-2020, we know most of those numbers. There's still some of the usage numbers we're not sure. The marketing year for corn ends on September 1. So our quarterly stocks report is going to help us refine the usage numbers that you see in the bottom half of these tables. The acreage report really has a big impact on the top right hand corner when we look at what is our estimate, our forecast for production. So if we use that blue column on the far right hand side as a reference point, that's kind of the numbers that we're currently being used, and we adjust those planted acreage numbers. What does that do to our bottom line? What does that do to that ending stocks number of about 3.3 billion bushels? So on my next slide, I did the math on that. What I did was, oops, that's two slides. If you can back up one, please, there we go. So what I did was I looked at, all I've done is changed the numbers in red. So I changed the planted acreage, which then translates into the harvested acreage. Now for corn, that differential is primarily corn silage. So if we harvest about, this would imply we might harvest about 88 million acres of corn. If we use the trend line yield of 178.5 bushels, it takes our total production down just a little bit. So our total supplies, if you add up all of the beginning stocks and production and imports, will also drop a little bit. I didn't make any adjustments to the usage numbers. So again, in July, when USDA revises their forecasts, they'll likely adjust some of the usage numbers as well. But if all we did was shift planted acreage, our ending stocks, our ending stocks for corn, at least not based on the forecast, would drop almost 300 million bushels. Now 300 million bushels is a lot of corn, and it sounds like a really, really big number. But it's in the whole scheme of things, when you look at producing 15.7 billion bushels, even with a revised number, that's not a lot. It's really kind of nibbling around the edges. So even if the acreage is dropped, we get trend line yields that 15.7 billion bushels, as an estimate, would still be a record large corn crop. Now as we move through the summer, this is things I've talked about before, that acreage, excuse me, the yield estimate is the number that is going to have also a big, big impact on what our production numbers are. So once we get these reported on Tuesday or next week, that'll kind of lock in those numbers, and then market will really, really be focused on the yield number and making adjustments accordingly. So again, acreage adjustments, they're going to be likely will be down. But at the end of the day, it's not going to make a tremendous difference in our bottom line. Psychologically it'll have an impact, but it's not really, I think in my opinion, unless there's some real shock value, unless that drop is much more than we expected, I really don't see a major shift or adjustment in corn prices. Now the next slide, I do the same kind of procedure with soybeans. So the blue column on the right hand side is the June forecast coming out of USDA with the planted and harvest acreage from essentially from that March 31 planting perspective plantings report. So on the next slide, what I did was I did the exact same adjustment. So most of the market analysts are expecting an increase or kind of a shift out of corn and a slight increase in soybean acres. We go to 84.7 million acres planted. Again, we take out some for failed acres for drowned out. We plug in the 49.8 bushel trend line yield and we get about 4.1, almost 4.2 billion bushels of soybeans produced. Now that would be the second largest crop in the US. The largest one historically in the US was actually 2018-19, which is on the far left hand side. So we're not over the top, but we're still very, very close to a record production even at that level. So again, if you do the math, you subtract out what our forecast for expected use is. The bottom line number for ending stocks increases by 58 million bushels or almost 60 million bushels. Again, it's an increase. It does have a psychological effect, but it's not a dramatic increase. And again, when you compare our ending stocks from 2018 to 2019, now into the forecast for 2020, it's still trending downwards. But again, recognizing 2018 with some very, very, very large soybean carryover stocks. On my final slide, I want to show you what would happen to wheat, but the challenge is with wheat, the planted acreage numbers that was used in the June report are nearly identical to the forecast that was coming out of the pre-report industry estimates. So really there was no change. So the expectation right now is on Tuesday of next week that it will likely not be very turbulent times or provide a lot of new or dramatic information for the wheat market. So again, my last slide, I just want to remind everybody on Tuesday, June 30, next week, Tuesday next week, June 30 at 11 o'clock central time. These reports are going to be released and again expect some market volatility when those reports come out. So with that, I'll hand things over to Tim. Well, thank you very much, Frain. And good afternoon, everybody. Tim Petri extension, livestock marketing economist. I'm going to talk a little bit about just slaughter stairs to begin with and maybe get more into the meat sector and more on case and preferences of consumers and things that have been going on there. But I showed you this slide last time. And you know, the red line again is this year. And for the last month, fed cattle prices have been struggling. And on that red line, there's a little blue attachment for this week. I'm expecting them to go down again, but we won't know Monday. So I think we're going to drop below $100 again, like we did back there in mid April. And then you see the futures are those red squares. And, you know, futures aren't optimistic at all. You know, and that's for the things that Brian got talked about at the beginning, the, you know, the problems with the economy and so on. We could do better than this and fed cattle, but we got to see how the pandemic goes. And so that's, you know, the demand part of it. If we go to the next slide, we'll talk about then the problems we're having on the supply side. Last week, when I talked to you, I said there was a cattle on feed report coming out in the afternoon. It did come out last Friday afternoon. And I said, we are really looking forward to it to see how many kind of a, what a backlog of cattle we might have. And so this slide shows the number of cattle on feed for over 120 days, almost a million head more than last year at this time. So a lot of heavy cattle out there. And, you know, we don't, didn't get in the report, but there's some estimates that the cattle on feed over 150 days might be half of that number anyway. So maybe half. So got a lot of cattle kind of backlogged in and waiting for the slaughter market and market knows that. And that's why those futures prices are as low as they are. And why the cash price is going down is because the market is aware of that. So go to the next slide. We didn't get any help from the hog industry, the quarterly, the cattle on feed report comes out monthly, but the hogs and pigs report comes out quarterly. And so that report did not help us out at all. We knew we had a lot of hogs around, but the USDA was even above trade expectations frame talked about trade expectations on the grain side. And we have the same thing here for hogs and pigs. You see that for all hogs and pigs, the trade estimate was for about 3.7% more than last year. And the shaded line there was the range in estimates up to about 105. The report came in at 5.2, which was on top of the trade estimates. There is some good news into the future in the middle part there that we did kill a lot of sows and the industry is trying to reduce a little bit because we've got a record number of hogs and record pork production and extremely low, below breakeven prices. And so breeding hogs about 1.3% less than last year, which again is good news, but it was on the high end of the estimates. And then we go down to all the market hogs, 5.8% more in the total U.S. above trade expectation. If we go to the next slide, then kind of shows you where the hogs are. And again, the backlog we have on the top there, there's a category for over 180 pounds. And again, this is as of June 1st. And so we're into, you know, well into June now. And so these would have been heavier than that and been ready for slaughter, almost 13% or 1.67 million had a big heavyweight hogs, all-time record high for that amount. And then the red circles there, down in the bottom left, you see that anything with the pound symbol is record high. And so number of states, this would be total hogs, not just the heavier weight. A lot of hogs, you know, Minnesota, Iowa is the big hog state, through in Kansas and some other states and so on and on the way on the right hand side towards the bottom of record number in the United States. So anyway, really a lot of problems up here in our part of the country because, you know, both Sioux Falls and Worthington, Minnesota were closed up here. And although South Dakota wasn't at a record level, they still had 11, almost 11% more hogs than they had a year ago. And, you know, Minnesota up there, nine and so on. So, you know, the story is actually a lot of hogs, a record amount of hogs and more than the trade was even expecting. So the futures market for hogs did show that today and down two to three dollars. Didn't quite spill over into the Fed cattle as much and Fed cattle and feeder cattle maybe down like 50 cents to a dollar or so. But anyway, still has an impact on cattle prices obviously because of the competing meat there. So go to my next slide. I'm going to kind of switch gears here. Maybe this would be kind of a Brian, excuse me, talk a little bit more. You know, we've been discussing restaurants and restaurants opening and again about half the meat that isn't exported goes into the restaurant trade. So the, you know, livestock industry is watching that close. So again, we go back to me when some of the restaurants first started to open up. And this is just the week compared to last year of the number of seated diners at restaurants that are open for business. And so we started off there at 40% and gradually coming up. And then by a couple of three weeks ago, we were up to about 60% capacity, which was good news. Means we're moving product to restaurants and then we spiked way up a week before last to about 90%. People are really anxious to get to restaurants and the seating capacity and so on was reduced in places from the, you know, 40% to 50 to whatever to in some restaurants allowing them back to many so. But then as Brian mentioned at the beginning, we had this spike in the number in the rate that he talked about. And so then last week, quite a few more open seats. And so we've got to watch this really closely for what Brian said, is that going to go up and then our people going to, you know, not be as willing to go to restaurants and so on. So going to the next slide. Here I'm just going to maybe kind of give a little history lesson again, talk more about tastes and preferences of consumers that really have changed since the pandemic. And maybe you look take a look more back at the history lesson, starting off here with pork belly prices are real interesting one for me to talk about pork bellies are the wholesale cut where we get bacon. And so talk about that when you look at that red line up there on top, that's just the normal seasonal price pattern for pork bellies that goes along with bacon. And if I was talking to you live, I wouldn't have put that picture up there and I would ask the audience why are bacon prices so high. Usually they're starting particularly by end of July and the summer months there. And the reason is very, very simple. That's when the garden tomato season comes on, everybody has a lot of tomatoes and they want to have BLT sandwiches. And you know, in some cases, tomatoes are free. I've got some grandkids that are wanting to garden and learn how and I think we put in 50 or 60 tomato plants this year. So if the weather comes through, we're going to have a lot of tomatoes to give away to. But anyway, that's the reason why kind of interesting. Again, just a history thing you see last year, that those dotted circles there, the peak in belly prices was a little bit later, almost a month later. And the reason why is some of you grow tomatoes and I know my tomato plants were late in producing last year and that was a U.S. thing too. So that kind of happened as well. But anyway, moving on then back to the blue line on that, oops, yeah, stand that the blue line on that chart. We talked about this earlier that bacon prices, you know, that the, when the restaurants closed down, bacon fell in price because consumers want to buy one pound packages and, you know, restaurants buy in 25 pound packages. So we had some adjustments there. But then as the shelves got bare and packing plants closed down, so there's a lot less being produced than we did spike for a while, but came back down to about average prices. Now you might say and, you know, with restaurants are open back up and we've channeled some to the retail store and so on. Kind of interesting, again from history lesson here. 20 years ago, the industry said that bellies are going to be worth nothing. There's a so-called, you know, fat, nobody wanted to eat fat and a prediction bellies would be worthless and because of the health craze. But actually, you know, as you can see that didn't happen. Interestingly enough, the Chicago mercantile exchange, bellies used to be a big trading item in the Chicago mercantile exchange. 20 years ago, CME quit trading bellies because they said nobody's going to want them. The price is going to go down to zero. So there's no use even trading them. But interestingly enough, you know, as we went to leaner pork and chicken and so on, we started putting bacon on a lot of different things. Chicken sandwiches even put bacon on hamburgers and that increased the demand, even wrapped bacon around tenderloin, beef tenderloins and so on. So we went from saying bellies would be worth nothing to now they are the most expensive wholesale pork cut even above loin prices. Just look at that red line up there on the average, bellies average a buck 20 a pound and pork loins average about 90 cents a pound. So by and far bellies are the most expensive wholesale cut when we thought they would be worthless. You know, our good friend Brian that just got through talking about if you've been watching his pictures, he's kind of feeding away. He's lost over 100 pounds eating mass quantities of bacon. So go to the next one slide please. Hot dogs is another interesting thing. This is again the week compared to last week change in the amount of hot dogs being sold in there when the pandemic set in a get back in March. Again, we just spiked hot dog sales kind of came off but they're still 17, 20% more than a year ago and that's that, you know, that retail that home trade as well. So go to my last slide kind of picking up again on taste and preferences of consumers and some of the same things I talked about on the hog side. This is one of my favorites to talk about on the chicken side and again kind of a little bit of a history lesson there. Most of you know that you know approximately my age and I'm going to date myself here too but in the 40s and 50s when I grew up on the ranch chicken was the most expensive thing we meet in the store. The reason why is because that was before the ticens of the world and commercial production of chicken chickens were free range, very expensive to grow so chickens were very, very expensive you know in the store. More expensive than beef or even lamb back then kind of interesting we did have more lamb back then. So you know on the ranch we had a lot of cattle, a lot of sheep, even hogs and so we had a lot of meat to eat but my mom said by golly even though chicken is expensive we've got a chicken coop out here and we've got cheap labor and we've got grain and so we're you know she liked a variety of things to eat so she said by golly we're going to have chicken and by the 4th of July we want to have some fried chicken so we'd always buy a couple hundred little chickens in the early in the spring and then buy here next week the little biggest roosters would be big enough and and so we could have some some chicken even though was expensive and that meant that you know somebody had to butcher them and so I had to butcher and pluck a lot of hundreds of chickens when I was young and you know this this is uh the top slide is about chicken wings but uh you know I didn't mind plucking those chickens but that wing that that you got a pluck takes twice as long to pluck the pin feathers and stuff out of the wing the whole chickens and I must have been an economist back then because I told my dad you know let's just cut that end wing thing off and throw it away it's all full of feathers they don't eat it anyway he said oh no no mom's got to have that wing on the industry side as well very difficult for the industry now even now with the machines they have to get those last feathers off the wing but anyway that's a that's a whole different story there so uh talk a little bit about chicken wing prices here tend to you know be fairly stable the red line throughout the year but they spike two times in the year they spike when the football season starts there in the fall and then they also spike at Super Bowl time this year the blue line you know a lot of wings sold at the restaurant level and so you see when the restaurants closed the prices plummeted but then as the restaurants opened back up like we talked about before people had to get in and get their fix on wings again so we we propped them back up but again you know about 20 25 years ago all wings were the cheapest thing on cheapest cut cheapest wholesale cut on chicken restaurants and even retail levels could sell breasts and and the legs really well but nobody wanted wings so restaurants would just throw them in the stock pot make soup out of them and then all of a sudden some industrious restaurant decided to put some sauce on them and try to retail them and then you know the rest of the story the craze took off there and everybody's eating wings and now we've got restaurants just devoted to to you know that's their main menu item and so something that was again worth nothing because of almost because of changing tastes and preferences of consumers now wings are the most expensive cut of chickens sell for more than breasts last week wings brought a dollar seventy one a pound on the wholesale market and breast bought a dollar twenty four and so again that's one of the reasons now why we're seeing boneless wings because breasts are cheaper than wings and so we're making what once used to be the most expensive cut we're making wings out of breast I jokingly like to say people to people that the ticens of the world hired expensive geneticists for work for many years to try to breed the wings off a chicken and now there had to fire all those geneticists and hiring ones to get more wings on chicken so with now that we've had our our bacon and wings for lunch let's get over and see what's happening in the energy sector thanks Tim Dave Ripplinger bio products bioenergy economic specialists I just again some a few comments about what's going on in the ethanol industry kind of first and foremost just comparing where we are this year versus last year and then also just looking at the dip that we're continuing to come off of basically this last week or the week that ended last Friday we again saw about a five percent increase in ethanol production which is approximately equivalent to the a little bit bigger than the size of North Dakota's corn ethanol industry so you know a few hundred million five hundred six hundred million gallons came back online were produced last year last week which is again good news the trajectory is the right way it's important to note too at summertime in that fuel use transportation fuel use for passenger travels is seasonally higher this time of year but again that's one reason why you might want to look at this time of year versus last year and right now we're running at about eighty three eighty four percent of where we were a year ago and again about this time a year ago we were at a hundred percent capacity utilization or close to it and again we would kind of see that continued growth frame and asked me a question earlier today you know where are we with that number today and it's actually somewhat tough to tell because we do know that a number of corn ethanol refineries have permanently shuttered that they won't be back and that's probably at least a billion gallons worth of capacity but we don't know exactly where that number is and some of the folks who are still closed will likely remain closed permanently whenever they decide to make that call and of course you know staying closed for for some amount of time doesn't necessarily help the financials and push things a little bit but again you know the trend is certainly in the right direction often off those lows in mid april looking at margins things are not as good as they were a week ago looking at some of the numbers from USDA for today but in general they're they're they're better than needed to keep folks rolling again my my my number is about a buck 25 and we're a dollar 36 crush for for a for a for a bushel a dollar 50 is really nice where it was a week ago in South Dakota that the refineries are paying a bit less for corn getting a little bit less for ethanol and also a little bit less for distillers so things aren't moving in the right direction but again it's as that capacity comes back online as production increases you'd expect those margins to decline a little bit but again you know we're still seeing that that that movement another way to look at this too is just like a base of storage so again uh the amount that's available in stocks versus that that that use that daily use and actually this last week uh ending ending last friday we had the lowest days in storage that we've had all year um and definitely in that range in the mid 20s uh where we'd like to be again the trajectory is is still moving uh down and again we've we've passed that threshold we're just above 25 days in storage uh which again is is a pretty supportive number uh last thing I have is just to look at the blend rate so this is uh ethanol input into a uh refinery or blender versus all the gasoline that comes out you know if it was all e 10 you know we'd see that 10 percent rate obviously we have some uh e zero still available in the marketplace in the little in some sales of e 15 and me 85 uh the numbers aren't perfect because it's not actually gasoline going into the refinery you know that's going to be uh you know produced in some respects you know you know at the at the refinery from crude so we don't have that number but it's really kind of interesting just to see the changes and so we saw that that relatively large dip as covid hit and I think a lot of that was just using up some of the ethanol that was already there that was already at the at at the blender at the refiner and now we're back to that same rate and so that that's good and in general what that means is we want to see uh increased gasoline consumption or continually increasing gasoline use uh with ethanol moving right along with it and again in general I think that that's for the most part where we're going with with summertime and for me it's you know we continue seeing that increase in click for the next month or two and then of course once driving season ends you know what's going to happen and of course you know Brian alluded to you know if we see uh the second wave or this continued growth of the of the virus or you know increased rates in certain parts of the country for example Texas you know what is that going to mean for travel and of course we don't know that for sure but in general the you know the trends are definitely going the right way uh final update that's all I had in terms of the biofuels market I just let you know we are going to continue with this webinar series throughout the summer but we're going to actually move the date to know how often we have it so beginning on July 9th which is a Thursday we'll begin we'll continue having the webinar series but it'll be every other Thursday through Labor Day as scheduled we'll be sending out some additional information so everyone who's on our listserv for this will be getting that information and we'll promote it a few different ways to make sure that everyone catches it on with that we'll move over and be happy to answer any questions that you might have again you can we prefer you our preference is to use the q and a tool but you're also welcome to use the chat tool if you're more comfortable with that I'll give you guys just a few minutes if you want to get to that again you can check out any recording of this at those sites below or check out some of these presentations if you want to see further we do have quite a few folks who do catch this later on and again you know you're obviously on now the folks who might catch it next week you know are also on on the docket too so with that I guess we'll wait a few more seconds and see if any questions come in the one thing I would say is that beef brisket is 233 at at Sam's Club so if anybody wants to buy a whole brisket that's that's not a bad price I already have one in the fridge one thing I wanted to add was you know with this trending increased rate you know there's a lot of talk right now in washington from just about everyone whether it's the house senate and the president the executive on if there's going to be another round of stimulus or a cares act like a program coming down the pike in the next uh a couple of months um and one of the things everyone's watching then an ag is is there going to be additional funding on top of what was already allocated under the cares act and I I tend to believe there's a there's a big appetite obviously with everybody basically saying there needs to be another stimulus in including the uh Jerome Powell the Fed chairman is saying that uh in all branches of our government are saying it so I would actually be surprised at this point if there isn't another round especially given the trend in the increased infection rate and what that's going to mean going forward so again we don't we don't have any answers on this but right now in my opinion there is going to be probably another now what it's going to look like can vary if anybody's looked they've got one uh bill that's an infrastructure type another one that talks about direct payments another one that talks about relief in the form of a tax long tax holiday where where basically federal income taxes aren't collected and on down the line and I would be surprised if there's not if there is another round that there's not a portion carved out for ag as well after everything from the initial program has been paid out so that's something to keep in mind and keep keep keep your eye out for that that that we made we may not be done this year actually um coming up with uh additional funding for farmers thanks ryan and i'm not seeing uh any other questions coming up i don't know frame or ten if you have any other comments you want to make no i don't i don't have any additional comments just if there were some questions i think i'm good i don't know uh ryan but you know on that farm payment thing i think doesn't some money get automatically put into the ccc here soon that could be used to that was appropriate but you didn't go until july or summer frame well it was the end of june it was after the end of june um so i guess in the next few days uh that that turns over and then there's some more funding available like as they said with the with the uh original program they were going to pay out 80 of what you calculated to be entitled to to ensure that there was enough money up front to give everybody some money and then whatever's remaining uh if there's enough you'll get the remaining 20 that you were in uh count that the calculator figured you were entitled to so that's kind of one of the things that they were waiting on but again the sign-up period for this goes went all the way into august so i i don't know that they would have a program another program on top of this one at the same time that the sign-up period was still available yeah right um so the timing of that may be a little bit screwy because they have to wait until they see how much is because they're not going to know how much they have to pay that that needs to be paid out until the sign-up period expired expires right but there would be some money there even without further appropriations if if it doesn't get expend if it doesn't get called for in that new money that goes into ccc yeah but i don't think it would be part of the program that would be part of the traditional role of ccc of being able to provide commodity loans and those other things there still needs to be funding available for that they can't just liquidate the triple c for for the cares act program there has to be enough money sitting in the kitty to do commodity loans and what they typically do with the ccc so that's what part of that money is also for great thanks guys uh since there are no more questions i want to thank the panelists again i wish everyone who's uh still on a happy fourth of july and hopefully we can see you on thursday july 9th as we continue the webinar series thanks