Chicago | Reuters – Chicago grain and soybean futures climbed on Wednesday after the dollar’s weakening to a four-year low made U.S. crops more attractive for overseas buyers.
Grain markets were also monitoring the impact of a winter storm on U.S. wheat fields and agricultural supply chains, while assessing comments by U.S. President Donald Trump about steps to approve use of a higher blend of corn-based ethanol fuel.
The most active wheat contract Wv1 on the Chicago Board of Trade settled up 12-3/4 cents at $5.36 a bushel, having reached its highest point since December 5.
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CBOT soybeans Sv1 gained 7-3/4 cents to $10.75 a bushel after touching their highest point since December 12. CBOT corn Cv1 was up 3-1/2 cents at $4.30 a bushel.
“Money continues to flow into the broader commodity sector amid the weaker dollar this morning, pushing crude oil prices to fresh four-month highs, while the grain and oilseed markets were mostly higher as well,” Arlan Suderman, chief commodities economist at StoneX, said in a client note.
The dollar index steadied on Wednesday but held near a four-year low hit on Tuesday in reaction to Trump’s reference to the dollar’s value as “great”, which raised expectations of further dollar weakness.
Trump did not announce new biofuels guidelines in a speech in Iowa on Tuesday, as had been hoped by some market players, according to Suderman. However, the president said, “They are very close to getting it done.”
Suderman said: “There’s a quiet optimism in the industry that the final guidelines will be net positive for demand for feedstock to produce biomass diesel, but nobody knows for sure, so the industry continues to hold back production for now.”
In South America, intense hot and dry weather has hit Argentina, threatening crop production in the world’s leading exporter of soy meal and soy oil and the third-largest supplier of corn.
However, Brazil is in the early stages of harvesting what is forecast to be a record soybean crop. Traders expect China to turn mainly to Brazil for imports in the coming months after a recent wave of U.S. soybean purchases.
In Russia, the world’s biggest wheat supplier, concerns over damage to wheat crops and disruption to exports from severe winter weather were subsiding.
Consultancy Sovecon raised its 2025/26 Russian wheat export forecast by 1.1 million metric tons on Tuesday to 45.7 million tons.
-Additional reporting by Daphne Zhang in Beijing, Gus Trompiz in Paris and Peter Hobson in Canberra
