Corn Futures Close Limit Down on Rain Forecast for US Midwest

Corn futures locked limit down on Tuesday, while soybean futures traded 6.7% lower, as forecasts pointed to rain relief for parched areas of the US Corn Belt.  

Weather will continue to be the primary focus of corn futures trading over the next several weeks, as markets look to new crop production to ease tight supplies of grain globally. Gro users can track a crop’s outlook using the Growing Conditions tab in Gro’s Climate Risk Navigator app. For example, this display shows changes in NDVI, soil moisture, and drought indicators for corn-growing areas in Iowa. 

The app’s Weather tab, displayed here also weighted for corn in Iowa, shows daily changes to NOAA GFS precipitation and temperature forecasts, and can be set for every district around the world. Being able to visualize these changes in the Gro Climate Risk Navigator offers greater clarity as forecasts shift day by day, and can be particularly useful during volatile weather conditions.  

The latest forecast is for a large rain system to start July 9 across a sizable portion of the Corn Belt, which should allow for better crop development, at least in the short term. However, crop stress persists in pockets of the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin after weeks of drought, as seen via Gro’s Drought Index. 

As the season progresses, Gro Standard subscribers can follow Gro’s US Corn and Soybean Yield Forecast Models for daily updates of corn and soybean yield estimates at the county, state, and national levels.

This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.