Morrow County Grain Growers                             Pendleton Grain Growers

             Duane Disque or John Ripple                                      Jon Sperl

             1-800-452-7396 or 541-989-8221                           1-800-422-7611 or 541-276-7611

              or Dan Steiner 481-6614 (office), 571-3798 (cell)  graingrowers@centurytel.net

                                                            GOOD MORNING!!!

            Below are the best indicated market bids as of:   9:00  on      3/17/08

***NOTE: Corn values vary depending on delivery location PLEASE call for updates.

            Over the weekend, we saw the first major casualty of the sub prime mess. One of the world’s largest investment firms, Bear-Stearns was forced to sell out to JP Morgan for $2/ share, as part of the deal, the Fed had to approve the purch quickly and guarantee up to $30 byn in mortgage assets. To further shore up the economy, the Fed also cut rates another ¼%. This is “very historic” even in the case of Wall Street affairs. So far no word on 14,000 employees that worked for Bear-Stearns. Last June 2 other hedge funds worth byns of $$ collapsed. Overnight the EU market was down 2-3%, and the Nikkei was down 3.7%. We talked in our marketing meetings last fall about what could have potentially negative impact on the markets, and the sub-prime thing was near the top of the list. Commodity markets are showing a lack of liquidity, as most of the players that would take a position opposite the funds simply cannot keep up, and are forced to the sidelines, so we end up with lop-sided one way trade, that doesn’t have a lot of bearing on actual commodity prices. COT showed the funds still INCREDIBLY long in Chic to the tune of 900 myn bu, and also long 2.2 byn bu of corn (2-3 years ago, a 300 myn bu position was considered VERY big). So with the lack of liquidity and lop sided trade, the push is on to expand limits in Chicago Corn and Beans to .30 and .90 respectively. Some private analysts say that it is still too expensive to plant corn. This may be reflected in the Informa report from last week. They did hit a 87.5 myn acre estimate for corn (which if you are keeping score, is the MINIMUM required to balance the S&D’s). The largest decline in corn acres is in Illinois (OUCH). The same report showed beans up 7.7 myn acres, and wheat acres at 63.1 myn acres.

            To “help” the farm bill along Petersen proposed increasing farm size. Today the ‘test’ is the farm must earn $1,000. Petersen proposed increasing to 20 acres and  or $50,000. Opponents say the $$ that MIGHT be saved are miniscule, and impact/ savings very small.

            China is working hard on internal price controls to keep production up, domestic prices lower. UN says that food prices world wide are up about 41% from last October. Russia will start its own “Russian National Mercantile Exchange” (RNMEX) on April 9^th.