NCI Market Update Webinar Series | Featuring Paula Sonnabend

Paula Sonnabend, Senior Manager of CLUTCH.

The Northern Crops Institute (NCI) hosted another monthly Market Update this past Wednesday, June 15. This month’s webinar featured speaker Paula Sonnabend, the Senior Manager of CLUTCH, an agricultural-focused “hybrid” marketing agency headquartered in Minneapolis, MN.

During this webinar, Paula touched upon a wide variety of topics, which largely revolved around the current outlook on crops grown in the region. This includes corn, soybeans, wheat, and more. She chose to focus mainly on the effects the growing inflation rate (which is the reason behind the rising costs of inputs and agricultural production items), a strongly diminished farmer sentiment (confidence in the market), and harsh weather conditions (high amounts of rain and well-above average temperatures early in the season) are having on this year’s growing and planting seasons. The ongoing conflict in the Ukraine and its global ramifications were also cited as factors contributing to an ultimately worse outlook this year than in prior years.

“As you can see, [farmer sentiment levels] have completely plummeted from a year ago,” said Sonnabend. “Farmers are just not optimistic about what’s going on in the marketplace. They’re worried about input prices, they’re worried about supply and demand, so on and so forth.”   

In addition to discussing the wide-ranging effects being felt in this region as a result of these global factors, Sonnabend also provided an overview of the WASDE (World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates) report for this month, and also a look at the acreage and stocks report for June. These reports echoed the issues described above in the global market, and included trends such as a reduction in shipping rates of different crops (due to shipping difficulties) and, of those crops, fewer are being deemed to be of “good/excellent” quality.

“Overall, shipping rates for exports across corn, soy, and wheat are 11-17% lower than last year at this time,” added Sonnabend. She was quick to point out that, while the shipping rates of these crops have taken a hit so far, the actual export levels of these crops are still relatively healthy. This means that there are signs of hope in this year’s tough growing conditions, this being one of them.      

Overall, it is abundantly clear that this year’s growing season has, and will continue to be, quite a challenging one, due to the numerous hinderances discussed above. Though there are some good news (as was mentioned prior), farmers are being tasked with adapting and generating new solutions to these problems in order to sustain, and maintain control of, their agriculture operations.

These market updates were created to engage with past and present course participants and offer market insight to those professionals. By providing this pertinent information on various topics, NCI has fostered growth and learning worldwide. NCI greatly appreciates contributions from speakers such as Paula Sonnabend during these Market Update webinars.

For more information about upcoming webinars, click here.

Click below to watch the recording from this past Wednesday.