Marketing update for 2013 and beyond

With the government shutdown in October, there were a lot of questions about how the agricultural markets would react. Would the lack of data from USDA have a significant impact on the day-to-day variation in the markets? Would market volume diminish given the lack of information? Well, the general answer turned out to be that the crop markets continued on as normal. Farmers and traders fell back onto private source data and continued to market and move crop. Combines rolled and the harvest proceeded as usual. And for the second straight year, the most common refrain, at least in central Iowa, was that the crops were “better than expected.”