Kub's Den

Throughout this growing season, any time you've heard about how dry or how hot it is somewhere in the Corn Belt, haven't you wondered: "Well, just how bad is it?" Not wanting to rely entirely on the words of some stranger on the internet, or not wanting to wait for the weekly USDA Crop Progress observations, haven't you wanted to teleport yourself to the various hot spots of U.S. grain production and do a little ground truthing of your own?

There are all the usual ways to get crop condition information and, ultimately, a yield outlook that will influence the grain markets' prices to move up or down. For instance, an army of human observers checks their local fields each week and their assessments are averaged together into the USDA's Crop Progress figures, which then feed into the model that gives us the monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) yield projections. There are also the more high-tech options, like the DTN Digital Yield Tour (https://www.dtnpf.com/…), that incorporates satellite data into its yield projections. If you're primarily worried about crop conditions and upcoming grain availability in your own local region, maybe the local convenience store or coffee shop is a decent source of information.

But wouldn't it be nice if there were huge databases collecting temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind, soil temperature and soil moisture all across the country, every day through the growing season, and even through the winter to know how much moisture is going into the soil?

As it happens, there are.

With a few clicks of your mouse, you can access -- for free -- all these observations from the various Mesonets being maintained by public-private partnerships and usually hosted by each state's land grant university. You can teleport yourself to just about anywhere in the Corn Belt and confidently know just how bad it is (or isn't).

They're called Mesonets because they're networks of automated weather stations on a medium or "meso" scale, which is the scale that a lot of real weather takes place. In practice, each Mesonet tends to have a state-by-state scale and a state-by-state system to deliver its information to the public, so it would take some pecking around to find exactly the collection of snapshots that truly reflect an entire crop's conditions or market perspective. A nationwide amalgamation of all the Mesonets' collected data would involve some virtuoso data wrangling, but the information is indeed out there for market participants to collect and use.

For instance, Tuesday's maximum temperature observed at Grafton, North Dakota (sugar beet country), was a beautifully pleasant 68 degrees (https://ndawn.ndsu.nodak.edu/…), while the maximum temperature at Valparaiso, Neb. (corn country), was 104 degrees (https://mesonet.unl.edu/…). The real-time observations of Oklahoma's Mesonet can be used to calculate how much irrigation was needed each day for a cotton crop near Tipton, Oklahoma, and how its precipitation shortfall peaked in mid-June (https://www.mesonet.org/…) but has recovered in recent weeks. Soil moisture at various depths measured in Ames, Iowa, shows the boom and bust (https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/…) of infrequent rain events this summer.

Some of the data collected by the Mesonets may seem like no big deal. Temperature readings and Growing Degree Days can be easily shown nationwide from satellite data. But local, individual measurements of soil moisture, or true, moment-by-moment wind observations? Those are pieces of the crop condition puzzle that only these networks of on-the-ground, calibrated weather stations can provide.

On the scale of the entire Corn Belt, however, the Mesonets are more of a patchwork than a nationwide network. Unless you happen to have one of these Mesonet stations directly next to your own field of soybeans, the rainfall observations could be drastically different from any other location even five miles down the road. It's true that some broad -- but helpful -- conclusions can be drawn, particularly for governments and agencies that need to plan for flooding, for instance, or to maintain roads. But getting consistent presentation of data from every corn field in America, or even every corn-growing county in America, is still not a reality. The closest approximation so far comes from the Regional Mesonet Program (https://mrcc.purdue.edu/…), hosted by the Midwest Regional Climate Center, or the vision of the National Mesonet Program (https://nationalmesonet.us/…, where you can at least find links to all the various Mesonets that might interest a commodity market participant.

Perhaps the best chance a commodity trader would have of using Mesonet data to their advantage would be to observe the growing conditions for a crop that grows in just one medium-scale region -- like rice in Arkansas and Louisiana, or the flaxseed, durum wheat or dry edible beans that are grown primarily in North Dakota. The North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network (NDAWN) is a notably prolific Mesonet, with over 160 observation stations rich with data about the conditions faced by the majority of the fields growing those specialty crops in this country. But when I asked its charismatic director, Daryl Ritchison, whether traders in Chicago, Illinois or Dalian, China were using NDAWN's data to form market opinions, he had to admit: "To be honest, I don't know."

That's about the only unknown for the well-covered state of North Dakota, however, where, with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can teleport yourself to any of those Mesonet stations, recording every detail of weather that's occurred in every corner of the region, every day through the growing season.

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Comments above are for educational purposes only and are not meant as specific trade recommendations. The buying and selling of grain or grain futures or options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for everyone.

Elaine Kub, CFA is the author of "Mastering the Grain Markets: How Profits Are Really Made" and can be reached at masteringthegrainmarkets@gmail.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @elainekub.

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