Agricultural economist at @aceatIL and @farmdocdaily. 🇨🇦🇺🇸. Research on commodity markets, finance, and policy in agriculture.
Urbana, IL
Joined February 2013
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ICYMI: My awesome Ph.D student Aayush Dhakal and I sized up fall storage pressure in the US Corn Belt in an article for farmdoc Daily.
However, this year's crop remains below trend in many states and there is little evidence of a storage crunch in either bushels or observed basis levels. That said, the US continues to push the grain handling, storage, and transport system harder than in the past.
A year with big corn acres, high yields, and/or large carry-in could create problems for movement and basis. farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/20…
Who owns US farmland? @Farmdoc has a new tool to visualize foreign interest in US farmland, created by my colleagues Bruce Sherrick and Juo-Han Tsay at the TIAA Center for Farmland Research. Doing this isn't easy, because the numbers are actually very small.
Only 0.67% of US agricultural land is foreign-held. The vast majority of that is forest land. Canada is by a wide margin the largest single origin of foreign farmland owners in the US.
I don't expect making these facts more accessible will end the melodramatics about foreign farmland ownership in the US. But it might help.
farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/20…
Just in time for harvest, my latest for farmdoc Daily with students Austin Belman and Esteban Vizcarrondo studies how harvest pressure creates a temporary decline in local corn prices.
Check out the full article at: farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/20…
Come participate in a vibrant and growing forum for commodity markets research! The NCCC-134 Conference on Applied Commodity Price Analysis will be back in Chicago, April 19-20, 2027. The call for paper proposals is out now. Submission deadline is Nov 20: farmdoc.illinois.edu/nccc134…
This week I had the honor of being invested in a new position: The Clearing Corporation Foundation Endowed Associate Professorship in Derivatives Trading at the University of Illinois.
The investiture ceremony shown here was an opportunity to reflect on the work that has informed my thinking on agricultural commodity markets. (The reference list for my remarks includes jstor.org/stable/1246888 and jstor.org/stable/44806020)
Has the grain industry stopped investing in growth? I got to talk about trends in US grain storage capacity with Chad Moyer from Rural Radio Network. There is a concerning decline in the growth of total US grain storage capacity since 2020 that so far defies a single explanation.
We dug into the data (the trend shows up everywhere!) and discussed implications for grain marketing. It was a great conversation that you can check out here: youtube.com/watch?v=bd1FpWr8…
You can find the original farmdoc daily article which started this conversation at: farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/20…
The NCCC-134 Conference is live in the Loop in Chicago! It's two days of compelling research presentations and meaningful knowledge exchange on agricultural commodity markets, price forecasting, and market risk management.
End of spring semester is the season for thesis defenses. We had a great one this week from my Masters student Yu-Chi Wang. Her thesis "The Effects of the Renewable Diesel Boom on the U.S. Soybean Complex: An Equilibrium Displacement Analysis."
She considers how much of recent changes in relative prices and production in the soybean sector can be attributed to renewable diesel demand. @ScottIrwinUI and Teresa Serra also served on Yu-Chi's thesis committee.
In addition to her thesis research, Yu-Chi also contributed to a series of excellent @farmdocDaily articles on soybean oil and meal prices: farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/20…
