 All right, well, good afternoon and welcome back to this week's edition of the Agricultural Market Situation Outlook that we've been presenting the last two months here at NDSU Extension. Same game plan as usual. We're going to have a few presentations with questions at the end. But with that, we'll go ahead and move over to Frayn Olson, who's going to talk about marketing. Yep. All right. Thanks a lot, Dave. So based on some questions we had at the very end of last week's session, I decided we'll take a little bit deeper dive into looking at a potential crop marketing plan for the crop year as we move forward, especially in the events of the COVID-19 disruptions that we're seeing right now. So on my first slide, I just wanted to remind everybody that crop marketing is really a challenge. I've met very few people that really enjoy crop marketing. There's a few of them out there, but most people really struggle with it. And there's several reasons for that. Part of it is based on the information we have today, we're trying to predict the future and obviously predicting the future is impossible. No one can consistently predict it. We're all basically playing the odds. So we're looking at, well, what's the most likely scenario? What's the most likely situation that we'll play out knowing that it could be better or it could be worse depending upon either planned events or things we might expect to happen or those unplanned events, black swan events is what some people are calling them like the COVID-19 issues. And that includes everybody, not just farm managers, but also processors, elevators, exporters, importers, myself, I mean, we're all kind of looking at the information and trying to anticipate what's the next big step we're going to take. And over my career, I've had a chance to interact with a lot of these folks and they're all asking the same basic questions. So the first part is, you know, give yourself a break just because things didn't work out before or you feel that you've made a wrong decision, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't keep trying. And with time and some effort, you can improve the odds, you will make some better decisions. And so please, you know, keep after it. This is one of those things where you just have to be very, very stubborn and a bit bullheaded and just keep after it until you feel more comfortable with it. So my next slide, I just wanted to talk also a little bit about the, there we go, kind of the current strategies. And a lot of farmers right now have this, well, I'll wing it, we'll wait to see what happens. And the challenge we have in marketing is that things change so quickly, you're not fast enough to respond or react to the marketplace. And so we have to be looking forward and try and anticipate. So this, well, I'll see what happens and make a decision later. That is really not a marketing plan. The other thing that I get a little frustrated with sometimes is we all have constraints. We have limitations on the amount that we can sell, on when we can sell. And sometimes those constraints also become then the crutch that we used to say, well, I haven't made a decision, so I'll have to. We have limits for on-farm storage. But again, sometimes you say, well, I got to sell because I need the extra bin space for the new crop coming in. Or we all have cash flow requirements, and again, trying to plan ahead and anticipate that is a good idea. But just to sell your crop because you have a loan payment do is not necessarily a great marketing plan. Same with income tax, income tax management. That's something that everybody has to do. I'm really encouraging folks to do that. But just don't not sell something just because of the tax ramifications. That sometimes you're better off paying the taxes and taking the extra income. So I don't want these constraints, these common things to suddenly become a crutch for not doing something. And then there's always this, I want to hit the high of the market. Its prices are pretty good right now, but I want that extra 10 cents. I want that extra 15 cents out of the marketplace. And folks, it's almost impossible to hit those highs. And so what we really need to do, what I've been trying to encourage people to do for a long time is to make targeted sales. Okay, so on my next slide, I talk a little bit about these steps that we go through in preparing and implementing a marketing plan. And I'm only going to have time today to really focus in on the first two, which are usually the most difficult. Once we set some expectations about what we think is going to happen in the future, we set some timing parameters saying if things don't occur by a certain date, I'm going to have to start making some sales. The rest of it kind of falls into place. So the most difficult are the first two. I'm actually going to start with setting some timing objectives first, and then back into setting some pricing objectives. What would be some reasonable pricing targets to try and hit as we move forward in time? So to help us do that, on my next slide, we need to think about what are those key things that might change the market psychology? When we look at the futures market today or we look at what's going on in the cash market, the prices we see today have basically embedded all of the information that's available right now. So as we look forward in time saying, well, where will prices go from here? We all have the psychological barriers we need to think about and talk about. And weather is obviously in this time of our production cycle a big one. But I want to point out if you think about the production cycle here in the United States as well as globally, there are these key time periods where weather becomes exceptionally important. It's always important, but where we have this heightened level of watching what's going on with the weather forecast, not only locally, but again nationally or globally. On the wheat side, as we look forward into the summer growing season, from the wheat market, we're really starting to think about wheat development. We're looking at kind of the winter wheat development right now, but the key will be when we start hitting the harvest. We've had some frost damage in Kansas and Colorado. Nobody really knows how much of a recovery there's going to be, how much of a damage is that going to do to our yield and yield expectations. So when the combines start running in the winter wheat country in July, we'll start getting those first read on, well, how big is this winter wheat crop? For corn, obviously, pollination occurs in July. And again, we're having fairly rapid planting progress this year. So that late July time period will be a really key kind of window for pollination, and again, the first read that we might get on what yield potential is for the corn crop. Shortly after that, we hit soybeans. Again, when we get into the early part of August, we get into flowering, and then by mid-August, we get into the pod filling or pod set and pod filling. So this July-August timeframe becomes really important for U.S. production. And again, the markets are watching those adjustments in yield and yield forecast very, very closely. And as you'll see in a few minutes, that's when we get a lot of volatility in market prices. But I do want to take a step back and remind everybody on the production side, we also have some key production regions globally that we also need to watch. Brazil and their sofrina or second crop corn during this time period now in May is when that corn is starting to fill. And again, the sofrina crop is under some pressure. There's been some dry areas in Brazil showing up, and so there's some concern about what that might mean for corn and corn yields coming out of Brazil, which is a major competitor for us. In the Black Sea region, primarily in Russia, but also Ukraine, they have a very similar kind of harvest and planting season, very similar to, let's say, Southern Kansas or Northern Oklahoma. So we get into this July time period. We're going to start to hear some yield reports coming out of the Black Sea region on how large is their crop actually going to be. So I want to just to emphasize, think about that July-August timeframe as being one of those really critical production seasons that we need to be watching the weather. On the demand side, I guess there's two things that right now the market is really focused on and concentrating. One of them is ethanol production and consumption, which we get weekly updates. And I know Dave Ripplinger is going to give us some more updates here in a few minutes. But that is something that we can track. And again, on the demand side, with the dramatic cutback we've had in ethanol production, the corn market is really zeroed in on so what's happening with fuel consumption, what's happening with miles driven, what's happening with the ethanol consumption. So again, that is going to be this summer, especially critical. Also, we get weekly updates on the export sales. And again, export sales is one of those things where we have potential for a shock in the marketplace. Domestic consumption tends to be relatively stable. It tends to be a bit more predictable. Even though we're going through all the supply disruptions now within COVID-19 and adapting to that, the overall usage levels tend to be pretty stable domestically. But the international market is where we see a lot of the volatility or the unknowns, the kind of this new change of attitude and philosophy. And right now, again, the marketplace is very, very focused on U.S.-China phase one agreement. The political tensions between the United States and China are ramping up again, primarily because of the issues going on in Hong Kong, but also some of the concerns around COVID-19. When we look beyond China, there's some other countries that I'm watching very closely to see what kind of an economic downturn and then potential recovery. And these, we sell a lot of our U.S. crop or agricultural products to both Mexico, Japan, China, obviously, as well as South Asia. And so there's still some uncertainty about what is our export pace. Are we going to be able to sell the kind of volumes of corn, soybeans, and wheat that we normally do into these markets? So on my next slide, let's zoom in a little bit and think about what's going on, particularly in the corn market. And what this is is a seasonal price pattern. So I look back historically, and this is a chart that I prepared. This is the December futures contract for different years. And we start at the January one time period and one run through basically mid-December when that contract stops trading. If you look on the very bottom, that red line on the very bottom is the 2020 December futures contract. And again, I pulled these charts last night, so they don't reflect what's going on right now, but we do have information as of yesterday. And I want to read off in the upper left-hand corner, you'll see that there's the color code. I know it's going to be very difficult to see, really not much I could do with the font size there. But I will read off real quick. The red line on the very bottom, of course, is what we're seeing right now in the December 2020 CBOT futures contract. The blue, that bright blue, is the 2009 December contract. The black line is 2018. The purple line is 2017. The gold line is 2016. The green line is 2015. And the brown line is 2014. So I took 2020 and I went back six years. And if we look at that, you can see, again, this is for pricing new crop corn. Okay, so if you're going to look at when's the best time to try and price my new crop corn, and we start looking for some seasonal patterns, you'll notice that in this June, July, August time period, we have tremendous amount of variability of a lot of volatility, which is what I tried to circle with the red circle there. And of the last six years, not counting 2020, of the last six years, we've had about an even split. There's about two of those years where prices increased throughout the summer, but then started to fall as we got into harvest. We had two years where it started out higher in the spring and kept going down and got lower and lower as we went into harvest. And then there was two years where it basically remained flat. So as I asked, people asked me the question, what does this look like? What should we be looking for for pricing objectives, for timing objectives, for pricing corn? I'm zeroing in on this June, July, August timeframe as your opportunity. If we're going to have a spike or a rally or some kind of event in particular from a weather standpoint that occurs and we get this pop in the marketplace, it will likely happen in that time period. By the time we get into mid to late July, as you can see, we tend to see prices start to fall into the harvest time period with a slow rebound or recovery as we move past the harvest window. So from the corn standpoint, there's some supply issues, there's some demand issues on the supply side. That's typically when we get these big volatility, these big spikes. So we have about equal odds. There's probably a one third to maybe a 40% chance we'll have some kind of spike or rally as we get into the summer months. The moral is, the story I'm trying to tell you is don't miss the opportunity. Because if you miss the opportunity during this time period, in particular in that July timeframe, by the time we get into late, mid to late August, everybody kind of knows what the crop looks like and a lot of that risk premium is already taken out of the marketplace. On the next slide, it's the same basic chart, the same format, but this is for November soybeans. November Chicago border trade soybeans. So this is a November contract. Again, the red line on the very bottom is the 2020. The blue line is the 2019. So you can see what happened last year. And when we looked at today's futures market prices for harvest delivery, they're very, very similar to the prices we saw at this time last year. Now, when we look at that seasonal bubble we get, when we look at those growing season time period, the June, July, August timeframe, there was about three years where we had a pop-up with a drop down again. And then there was about two years where we had a downward trend throughout the rest of the summer. And there was one year where it was about flat. So again, if there's going to be a weather concern, if there's going to be a pop-up or a rally in the marketplace from a supply side concern, it will happen, but it typically doesn't last very long. So again, I'm arguing that you need to have some pricing targets in place. And when those events happen, if they do happen, take advantage of them. Because by the time we get closer to harvest, all of a sudden that November contract starts to realize how much are we going to have from a production standpoint? And what does it look like going into the rest of the winter? On the next slide, I've done the same thing for the Minneapolis. Now this is the December contract. I know a lot of the elevators are using the September contract to price harvest delivery, but I wanted to give this time perspective very similar to the corn and soybeans. So I chose the December Minneapolis contract. This is for spring wheat. Again, the color coding for the years are identical. If you look on the very bottom, you'll see that the red line right now for December, this is December spring wheat, is at levels a little bit below or similar to what we've seen the last couple of years. Now it's interesting that on the wheat side, the story is a little bit more jumbled. And again, this is spring wheat specifically. So as you look at this July and August time frame, we see about three years where we had a spike up within a retracement and there was about three years where we saw downward slides throughout the growing season. So again, part of this is the impact of not only the spring wheat crop and our expectations for spring wheat yields, but also what's happening in the winter wheat market. So again, I wanted to provide this context that we have this window of opportunity or potential opportunities this summer for a weather scare or some kind of issue to appear. And it often does, but please, please don't miss those opportunities. So the next slide, I'm going to talk more specifically about what do we do today? What are some specific pricing targets for, for example, for new crop corn? Now again, I pulled this chart as of last night. The black line that goes down is the actual futures market trade on a daily basis. The blue lines I put in there are support and resistance lines. And again, these are what I would consider psychological barriers. Now we did see a pop up yesterday in the corn market in December corn. We're seeing a little bit of a retracement this morning, but we're really hovering right around that blue line. We popped up through it yesterday, which is a strong signal that we may be moving into a higher updraft in the marketplace. But as I start looking at the analysis here, I think that 355 will be the next kind of major sticking point. If we get kind of a rally going, if we get some positive news in the marketplace, how high will prices go before they kind of top out? So I'm trying to use these lines as potential pricing points to give you some indication of psychologically, what is the market thinking, not necessarily what you think and what you feel you need out of the marketplace. So 355 is kind of that first major target. I have the red line at 370 as well as about 405. And those red lines, in my opinion, are going to be much stronger resistance levels. Those are going to be much, much harder for the market to be able to push through and to give us higher prices. And the reason the 370 is important is for twofold. Number one, we have several points where that's where the market has popped up and kind of stalled and started falling again. But also when you do the math on a break-even, kind of a typical break-even for corn around the U.S., that 370 number seems to be coming up pretty common. And what I'm concerned about is as we get closer to 370 and people start looking at saying, well, at least I can sell corn or at least start pre-pricing some of my corn at a break-even level, I think there's going to be some selling pressure that starts to increase and we'll put it kind of a lid or potentially put a lid on or an upper boundary on the price movement as we move forward. On the next slide, I do the same thing with soybeans. So this is a November soybean contract. You can see we've been kind of in range bound between about a 3, I mean, 835 and an 865 range for quite a while. Again, I do think it's possible to be able to push our way through that 865 barrier, again, if there's in particular some production issues. But as we move upward, in my view, my opinion is that $9 mark is going to be a real sticky point. We can get some upward movement, but that $9 in my opinion is going to be a real psychological barrier, not only because it's $9 even, but just we have some structural breaks. We've got some gaps that formed at that price level. So if we can get above that, then we have some upper potential, but that's going to be a challenge in my view, given all the things that are going on currently in the marketplace. And my next slide is for the hard red spring wheat, the Minneapolis contract out of September. So I kind of switch back to the September contract so you have some pricing points for your local elevator. Right now, we're still in that trading range between about $525 and about $5, let's say, call it $540. I think we'll kind of be range bound in there until we get a better read on what is the size of the winter wheat crop. If we do get a rally out of spring wheat, in my opinion, my kind of hard level would be about $560. I think it's going to be really difficult, unless something dramatically changes in the wheat market. To really push a lot higher than about $560 on the futures. So my last slide, I just want to remind everybody, what I'm asking farmers to do is we're always thinking about what will cause that lift in the market. And I'm asking you to do that. So what do you think the new development in the marketplace will be to increase prices? Or to rephrase that, what is going to cause the buyers to be nervous enough to pay a higher price than we see today? And you need to be really thinking about that as a seller to say on the other side, you have to have a buyer that's willing to purchase this. And then the last question is, so what are the odds? What's the probability? And again, if we get kind of a lift in the marketplace, I'm a bit concerned that those rallies won't last very long and you better be taking advantage of it. So with that, I'll close off and hopefully there'll be some questions as we move forward. Good afternoon, everybody. Tim Petrie, Extension Livestock Marketing Economist. Go ahead and go to my first slide. And I know last time we covered the CFAP program and again, I want to make a disclaimer right away that we are just providing education, but USDA is the official gatekeeper of all this. And so to help you out a little bit here, and I know there are a lot of questions and if you do have questions, you can ask us today or send them to us. But next week, the USDA North Dakota Farm Service Agency and we are co-hosting a webinar June 4th, 11 o'clock. The website is there, our farm management website to register. They will, the USDA will be on there, so they'll give you their official announcement of any questions you have. And again, we can take them in generalities cover them, but that'll be a chance for you to ask specific questions or if you want to send them to us and have us ask them. You can. So go to the next slide. Just going to spend a little bit more time on slaughter steer prices. The two biggest things that affect feeder cattle prices in the fall are slaughter steer prices and the future site of it as well, and then corn prices. And Fring just talked to you about corn prices, things to watch and what might cause corn prices to go up or whatever there. So again, those are the most two important things and I'm going to talk to you mainly about slaughter steer prices. As you can see, economists like to have a lot of lines and so on on charts as Fring just showed you and I did here, I could probably talk to you this slide for 30 minutes or more and I'm only hopefully going to do about three minutes or so, but this is our five areas slaughter steer prices. That'd be the average in the US for fed steers. The last three years, the red line again, like Fring's is this year and then the yellowish gold line is 19 and the green line 18 and the blue line 17. I like to say if it happened in the last three years, it can happen again. So and then the red squares towards the bottom are what the futures closed at yesterday. They are trading off, they have been up this week and there's some profit taking today, so about a down a dollar, but that's kind of the story there. And then the red bars towards the top of the chart with the blue line around them, that's what the futures were on January 21st. So you can see back then we're expecting higher prices for fed cattle and feeder cattle. Well, everything was going rosy record exports and domestic demand very strong, strong stock market all that and that all went south, of course, with COVID. But anyway, let's look at the red line there and you see we have had a recovery in fed cattle prices since that low there in mid-April and not back up to where they were at the beginning of the year, but a nice rally there. And so in a little while here, I'll talk about why that happened, but I want to stay on this slide as well. Interestingly enough, you see fed cattle prices now are above where they were the last two years, above both 2019 and 2018. And so I know there's a lot of doom and gloom out there, but prices are now higher than they were at this time of the year of the last two years. And however, another disclaimer there, this fed cattle market is a somewhat fickle one because even though in a while I'll talk about slaughter capacity, we are constrained and all the packing plants aren't operating at 100% capacity. So shackle space is a problem and even though here is what the market is and then what packers are paying, that doesn't mean that you can get it because particularly up here in Minnesota, North Dakota, Northern South Dakota probably wherever you're from because there's a bottleneck still at the packing level. So the prices are above where they got last year, but if the packer says I just can't take your cattle this week or I can't take them next week or whatever, you're kind of stuck there. The other thing I want to talk about here on this slide before we move on is you see last week we averaged 117 to 118. That's about what we're doing this week. We are selling some for more than 120, but up in there. And however, you look at the June futures, the June futures down yesterday were 101 today. They're off a dollar. So they're right at 100. You got an $18 basis there, meaning our cash market is above the futures market, the June futures by $18 on June 30th. Those two have to come together. So either the cash market has to fall, the futures market has to come up, or a combination of the two. And that's pretty important for us to know is the cash market going to go down or is the futures market going to go up? And so just, and I guess one other thing that I want to talk about, you see there when we're up there at 118, 119 on the cash market, that's not too far from where the June futures back on January 21st said we should be. And another kind of interesting thing to me and kind of also interesting is if COVID wouldn't have hit possibly what would cash prices would have been? Would they have been quite a bit higher or lower? That's something we will never know. So go to my next slide. The reason why Fed cattle prices have recovered, as you saw there, is simply because our slaughter capacity has increased, not nearly back up to where it should be, I suppose. But anyway, we're making good progress there. We're slaughtering more cattle. And so, you know, packers are bidding. And so that has helped the prices recover unlike when prices were going down and down, down there from mid-March into mid-April. We were just losing packers. And unfortunately, a lot of packers here in the North started off with Tama, Iowa and then Greeley and then Dakota City and then Skyler, Nebraska, all Northern packing plants. And so that affected the U.S. price. But it really, really affected us up here trying to find shackle space. But those markets, those packers, I should say, are all operating now, unfortunately, at less than 100% capacity because of all the CDC and OSHA guidelines and so on. But we're going in the right direction on slaughter there. So that's helped us on the Fed cattle price side. If go to the next slide then, is the reason why the futures market is so much lower than the cash market. So, you know, this data comes out all the time and the traders in Chicago are watching this. So the cattle on feed, the USDA cattle and feed report came out Friday. I mentioned that last Friday. You see that blue line there is the number of fed cattle on feed for over 120 days there. And up there at 4.8 million compared to a year ago, down closer to 4.3. So about a half a million more cattle there, you know, that are backed up. You might say that, you know, are trying to find a place in a shackle space in a slaughter plant. So the future market says that and say, hey, we got a lot of cattle there. The other thing to substantiate that is you go over on steer dressed weights that normally this time of the year, they'd be going down, down, down because we're, you know, bringing in newer crop calves that weigh less and then also warmer weather to the south. But, you know, our steer dressed weights been going up to, you know, up 8.97 pounds or something compared to down there at 8.50 a year ago. So that again just shows you that we got those cattle on feed for over 120 days and they're weighing more. So that's going to be more beef production. So the futures market traders see that and that's why there's that big disconnect between the two and that's going to have to be sorted out in the next month. So go to the next slide. We still are merchandising some feeder cattle, but a lot fewer last week only just over a thousand and so on a lot of different market classes hardly enough to establish a price compared to over 3,000 last week. And, you know, that's a normal seasonal thing. By now we probably would have been down to about just some few stragglers. And my advice to you if you still have backgrounded cattle to sell is please get in and talk to your market. Tell them what you have and they know what the buyers and, you know, and many times now we're down to less than truckload lots. And so that gets tougher to merchandise them. So if you still need to sell some, get in and talk to your auction market, let them help you out. And, you know, when volumes might be good enough or when one might be a time when you can still merchandisable. We've gotten rid of, in the last month or two we did get rid of quite a few cattle here. So although I do know there are some left. So go to the next slide. I've been showing you this before then and, you know, this is just the 750 to 8 that might be a lot of those backgrounded cattle. And that red line there, we've been talking about the last several weeks. Again, we're just merchandising a lot of them, averaging at least in that 130 to 135. The market even there, even though there were a few of them this week was a little bit stronger, but right in what they've been the last month before that first April when we had that big crash. I left the May futures on there that, that, you know, already closed there between 126 and 127. But notice, you know, ever since the March, April, and May futures the, our cash prices have all been higher than that. The cash price that the futures trades on is a CME cash settlement price and they have been lower, but our prices have been better up here because of quality and a good demand for our cattle up here. So that's a plus. Then go to the fall futures up there again, our 139 again off a dollar or two today because of profit taking, but there in November actually futures not that much different than cattle prices were last year. Up there they were 140, 142 and up 138 and so on. So that's kind of the story for me. Now I'll wait for questions and turn it over to Ron as the next speaker. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Ron Haugen, extension farm management specialist with the extension service. And I wanted to talk a little bit today about PPP loans. I've talked about them several times over our webinar series and we've got some new guidance on some of these loan forgiven loan forgiveness rules. Some of these loans now have been in effect for the eight week period already. It's getting to be. And so now we're concerned about people that have these loans want to get them forgiven. And there's an application for this forgiveness. And you would have needed to pay out your proceeds from these loans within that eight week period in order to get full loan forgiveness. Now any part of the loan that is not forgiven will be considered a loan and then you must make your payments accordingly. So there's a few questions that we've gotten some information on. The next slide is the first question. It says, the next slide please. If an employee is laid off, which may have happened, of course, with some of these businesses, and then they're offered to be rehired and then they decline the offer, does that affect my PPP loan forgiveness? Because the spirit of the PPP program was that they wanted to keep people employed. Okay, but that necessarily wasn't the case. Some people just had to be laid off for a time period. But no, it does not affect your forgiveness rules. If you offer the person to be rehired and they decline the offer. These different criteria must be met. However, the borrower has offered to rehire the employee for the same salary, wages, or number of hours. The borrower must in good faith have a written offer to rehire. You must document that the offer was rejected by the employee. Maintaining records is very important. And then the borrower must inform the state unemployment of this as well. So the next slide is another question that we need an answer to. What if an employee resigns during this period? Let's say they've gotten laid off. They found another job. Luckily they may have found another job, or they just don't want to go back to this company. What happens then? Is that going to affect your loan forgiveness? Well, the guidance says no. Employee reductions caused by voluntary employee resignation does not reduce your loan forgiveness factor. So that question is answered. People can have ease of mind there. The next slide is another question that people were wondering about. Let's say you have to terminate somebody for cause, which happens occasionally. They just aren't working out. Does that count against your loan forgiveness? No, the answer is. The PPP loan forgiveness application clarifies that employee reductions caused by terminating the employees for cause does not reduce your loan forgiveness application on your application. And then the last question that needs to be answered. The next slide is if an employee goes out on an on-paid leave at the employee's request, does that count against? Well, it's a little gray here, probably not. The PPP loan forgiveness application does not explicitly address this on-paid leave, but the guidance clarifies that employee reductions caused by the employee voluntary requesting and reducing their hours does not affect the loan forgiveness. Basically, you're not penalized if your head count is different than before the COVID. And then lastly, the takeaways from this is that the SBA and the Treasury are not interested in forcing you to hire the same people back. People don't want to work. It's more of a common sense, reasonable approach. And then that's kind of in the spirit of the PPP. But whatever you do, documentation is very important. Document everything you do with your employees and everything will go fine. So I just wanted to give you a little update on the PPP loan forgiveness, which in some cases are taking place right now. So next, we'll move on to Dave. Great, thanks, Ron. Dave Ripplinger, Bioenergy Economic Specialist with NDSU Extension. Just have some brief comments this week about what's going on in the corn ethanol market. It continues to strengthen. Again, this data is from a week ago from a survey taken by the Energy Information Administration and was released yesterday. So it's the most timely data that we have. The top part of the slide or the graph there, you can see that both production and input, so that would be use or ethanol flowing into refineries or blended at the rack. It's steadily increasing. And actually one thing we did see this week is that production for the first time just slightly outstripped input, but they're very close. And that's reflected to some extent in the days and sort, which is the bottom half. And we can see that we're down to about 32 and a half days of ethanol and storage, which is getting close to that desirable area. Some were around the mid-20s or that 27-day buffer that we had before things really started to deteriorate in mid-March. Looking also at the crush with data from USDA, we get that data daily. Margins have steadily improved since the worst, which is about the early part of April, but actually off just a bit off of last week. Corn prices have strengthened somewhat. Ethanol prices are the highest that they've been, both futures, and then here with this spot price for self-coder ethanol refineries. Distillers prices continue to decline as there's a little bit more balance in the market. Crush is close to that point of break-even. $1.25 a bushel is a really nice number to hear. And of course, this is just for average numbers reported for self-coder refineries. So many are doing okay. And again, we're continuing to hear that more ethanol refineries are increasing production or coming back online, which is evident in the data. And of course, this last weekend, we had the Memorial Day holiday, which is a traditional driving holiday. Certainly saw an increase in vehicle miles travel. I'll talk about that in a second. Summer motoring season is upon us, and a big question for the industry is exactly what does that mean in light of COVID? Some data I pulled from a group called Streetlight Data this last week in terms of vehicle miles traveled. So this group as well as others collect data from actual vehicles passing through intersections. If you didn't know, many of the intersections across the country, even in rural North Dakota, I do have counters. And some of that data can then be used to estimate vehicle miles traveled across a county metropolitan area and the like. So this is data that Streetlight has made available for free since the beginning of the crisis. And we can kind of use that to see what's going on. And so if we look with that orange line, that daily vehicle miles traveled is the first place to start. And we can see that it steadily declined throughout March. And then it has been for the most part been upticking. And of course, you can see, since this is daily vehicle miles traveled, there's a lot more traffic on the weekend, at least recently. And again, that's primarily because there's very little travel substantial reduction in people commuting to work. And then a lot more activity as folks do go shopping or possibly recreating on the weekends. And so that's why I made the blue line, which is that seven day moving average of the vehicle miles traveled. Again, you see the dip and then the steady increase, but with a little bit less variation that you see in the daily measure. And then finally also calculated, just that change in the seven day moving average. So how did it change from day to day? Again, a huge drop. And it's been positive now for quite some time, actually since the beginning of April, a sizable increase over the Memorial Day holiday. And then the big question is what's going to happen in the future? Again, this is for Cass County. So obviously the Fargo, West Fargo area, as well as rural locations, do have the data for every county in the country. Cass County is actually a pretty good indicator. It does have some rural data in it, some other freight type data in it. But it's really, this chart is really indicative of what we've seen across the country. You can, I don't have the data here, but you compare to Los Angeles County or Cook County with Chicago, the behavior is relatively the same, a huge drop, steady increase, certainly have not recovered to where we were, but the trend is certainly in the right direction. And so that's what I had to present today. Once again, to bring back what Tim had mentioned earlier is that NDSU is hosting, NDSU Extension is hosting a webinar with FSA. It's next Thursday at 11 a.m. And the best way to join that is to just go over the farm management website. There's also a press release that came out today, so you may be seeing it in other places, but you're definitely encouraged to participate in that. I know that Ron Hogan is going to be sharing some examples during that program next week. On with that, move on to Q&A. I guess the PowerPoint is here, and then they say, can it be reproduced to provide to clients? Yeah, I saw the question, Tim. Okay, so we do post every, at the end of this, we post a recording at the locations noted below for the websites. So we do have both the recording as well as a PDF version of all the PowerPoint slides. So those are available. I guess if you want something specifically from my slide deck, I'd be happy to try and share that with you. I guess I want to make sure that I understand what you're going to be using it for, but I'd be happy to try and share information. So please contact me directly if you have more questions. But it is available in a PDF format at both the farm management website as well as the Extension Alerts webpage. Great, and then there's a question for you, Ron, about PPP, schedule, line 34, schedule F. How do you verify payroll expense for forgiveness? Okay, line 34 is the bottom line on the schedule F, the profit, and what it is for sole proprietors then, they're taking 850 seconds of that for that 8-week period. Any amount, $100,000 or less, you're limited to $100,000 max on that. And that's what they're using as a proxy for your forgiveness. Great, thanks, Ron. And right now, that's all the questions we have. Just to reiterate, the recording of this and the presentations themselves in PDF form will be on the farm management webpage. And so you're welcome to go check this out later or to come back again and watch the recording or look at the presentation. And also, too, that there will be a survey when you close the Zoom window. As no questions are coming in, I wouldn't ask all the panelists or anything that came to mind during the presentation or the comments made by other panelists. No, just I guess I'd like to encourage everybody, if you do have topics or issues that you want us to try and cover in the future, please, again, either fill out the survey at the very end or, again, you feel free to contact us individually if you want. Because we're always trying to answer the questions that are most important to you, not necessarily what we think is important. So please, this is a participation event as well, so we need your feedback. Thanks, Frank. A question likely for you. What do you think is the break-even price for soybeans? Maybe that'd be a question for you. Okay, so I know I looked at some of the crop budget information as well as some of the information from the North Dakota Farm Business Management Record System. I guess the break-even in this region is plus or minus about $8.50 on the futures. When I say break-even, that's farmers able to pay all of their bills, but there's nothing left over for your return to labor and management. So there's no earnings that you can use to be able to make any kind of family living payments. So we're looking at about a 740-ish, 745, 750, somewhere in that range for a cash-level price, and I added about $1.10 for basis on the futures market as a reference point, so we can just all look at the futures market and say, well, what are those key pricing points? Now, again, that's kind of an estimate on my part, but I would say probably in that on the futures market, somewhere in that $8.50, $8.60 range. Thanks, Frame. Again, we'll give folks just a few more minutes for questions. One thing I'd bring up, Frame mentioned the importance of looking at ethanol crush and the role it has on corn prices. That's definitely true. Looking at the futures market, the national market is helpful, but again, so much is local, and so if your local refinery is closed, the impact on that spot price on the basis could be substantial. We're relatively fortunate right now that most corn ethanol here in North Dakota is running. Guardian is now down to Hankinson, does have cash bids, but the folks whose corn ethanol refinery is still shuttered or is running it at less than full capacity, those local prices, there's going to be a disconnect between that and futures even more so than usual. And that's one of the things we look when just looking at the spot prices recently. And again, I've made the same comment too about WTI and other crude prices. There's been a huge disconnect between traditional spreads, between these commodities. And so it's definitely helpful to some extent to look at those national prices, but that local price could differ quite a bit. That's a good point, Dave. Thanks for bringing that up. And if there aren't any other questions. Yeah, let me make, you know, about that webinar, that webinar is going to cover everything. That isn't, I may be made it sound like livestock, but it's crops, specialty crops. Everything will be covered. So if you have a question there, also I talked to a number of producers this morning that have already on the livestock side, at least maybe further crops to have printed off the applications from FSA and have been submitting them and or have an appointment. And so things are going along there and get your questions answered that you have next time, but the process is moving forward. So probably the sooner, the better that you get that process going. Thanks, Tim. A follow up question for Ron regarding PPP and line 34. Does a farmer have to write himself a check for labor? As far as I know, no, you do not. Yeah, that's just considered that the bottom line is your wages for the year. Great, thanks, Ron. And with that, I think we'll wrap up the webinar for this week. Again, thank you to everyone for participating, the panelists and those of you who are able to dial in. Feel free to, and we encourage you to complete the survey at the end of the webinar to check out the PowerPoint slides and the recording. And then, of course, we do have the webinar next Thursday morning. So once again, I want to thank everybody and hope you all have a great week. And we're having this one too, right? There's two webinars, one Thursday and then this one and we'll do it. We're going to continue on as long as people keep dialing in. Thanks, Tim. And thanks, everybody else. Have a great weekend.