North Gower Grains

Monday, February 23, 2026, 7:15 am

Friday was another mostly positive day for our markets.  Spot corn closed up 1 3/4, spot soybeans closed down 3 1/2, spot winter wheat closed up 14 and spot spring wheat closed up 4 3/4.  In the overnight trade all of our markets have fallen onto the negative side.  Oil closed up $0.08 on Friday at $66.48 per barrel.  It is weaker in trading this morning with it now valued at $66.44 per barrel.  Our dollar traded in a very narrow 10 basis point range on Friday between a low of $0.730 US and a high of $0.731 US with it closing out at the top end of the range.  This morning with some choppy trading it is once again valued at $0.730 US.

On Friday the tariffs that President Trump has imposed on all the different countries were thrown out by their Supreme Court as they were ruled illegal.  President Trump responded almost immediately with a proposed new 10% tariff on every country and also stated that his administration would have other options to impose the tariffs.  On Saturday morning he announced that the new tariff would be increased to 15%.  It seems like the marketplace took this mostly as a non-issue and marched ahead as part of the ruling was that the current tariffs could stay in place for an additional 150 days.  For our commodities soybeans were the only ones directly affected as they went from about 8 cents on the positive side to 7 cents on the negative side when the court ruling came out.  Immediate concerns came out on how China would react to the likelihood of the current tariffs being cancelled and that this could negatively affect soybean purchases by China.  All in all the markets are going to take some time to work out what this really means for trade in both the short term and longer term.

Managed money went long for on our commodities for the week ending Tuesday, February 17^th.   It was interesting to see that the decreased their short position (looking for prices to go down) in both corn and the wheat market.  At the same time they increased their long position (looking for prices to go up) in the soybean market.  They now have a large long position (163 thousand contracts) in soybeans which shows that they are betting that China will be increasing soybean purchases from the US and this will be driving up prices.

Last week was a mostly positive week for our commodities.  Spot corn closed down $2 per tonne with this year’s harvest ending up even.  Spot soybeans were down $1 per tonne with this year’s harvest also ending up unchanged.  Spring wheat was up $6 per tonne across the board.  Winter wheat was the big winner with it being up $9 per tonne for old crop and $11 per tonne for this year’s harvest.