It makes me a little nervous this time of year.

You're absolutely right.

And if you look at Friday's Commitment Traders Report, there's a few interesting things, especially in the corn market.

The managed longs, when we look at the futures only, they control about 22% of the open interest in corn right now.

And that is the largest control of open interest they've had since March of 2022.

So you're talking four-year high in open interest in the fund managed length in corn.

And the commercials have taken the other side.

I'm curious, is that the sort of thing, those sorts of policy kind of uncertainties that are keeping it quiet as far as the funds go in the cattle?

What is up, my friend?

Yeah, I wish we had good news to talk about in the case of the cattle market, and it's really hard.

We have had a nice rally in the cutout values over the last five days, about a $20 gain in the choice, and that's not uncommon this time of year.

There's a lot of beef demand, but once we kind of get past Labor Day, it seems like that buying interest starts to slow off, which is what we expect this year is.

Cutouts rallied $25 last year.

They rallied this summer so far.

Pretty good rally here in the last five days.

Where will this end up? Cattle prices, where are they going to be at year's end?

How much is crude influencing the ag markets presently in your mind?

Yeah, you know, it's probably described this summer as two words, both begin with W, weather and war.

And it's certainly impacting us.

You can't really talk about corn without talking about soybeans.

And you can't talk about any of these markets without talking about weed and what's happening because crude oil is pushing back higher.

You know, we pretty much removed all the premium that we had put into because of the war when we thought we were at an end of the war.

We came back to those areas that we were, what, late February, early March when the war broke out over the weekend.

I mean, did it all get flushed out there and we established longer-term lows?

Right

...

Father's Day, 4th of July, and now we're past the 4th of July with really only Labor Day ahead of us.

And so the demand is, is usually going to soften here in the last half of the year.

It's bringing our cash markets down.

Our cutout values are dropping.

Uh, we were kind of mixed at midday, but Monday afternoon saw $7 losses in the choice.

What do you tell ranchers out there? Where do you see this going in the fall and then one year from now?