As a guy who has studied and written about commodity markets a long time, something I had to come to terms with years ago is the joy of publicly being wrong now and then.

Approaching the 2019 harvest season, conditions would seem to favor a pretty benign weather pattern.

It has been a wild year. Flooding and unplanted crops, trade disputes, African swine flu.

I recently attended a conference in Minneapolis of international ag journalists.

It seems there is always more to do on our farm. We have sheep to sort and fields to irrigate; fences to fix or cows to gather. Rarely do we have any down time. It's tempting to blow and go, put your head down and just keep moving. That's the way things are usually...

Much of the focus of this year's unusually wet spring weather has been on corn and the impact it will have on reducing ending corn stocks and raising prices in 2019–20, but another bullish aspect of spring took place in U.S. soft red winter (SRW) wheat.

"What's your crop look like?" "Get any rain last week?" Put farmers together and you can bet weather and crop conditions will dominate the conversation.