Monday Market Briefing - 7th April 2025

Markets last week were strangely quiet and subdued despite being packed with news and drama and we ended up broadly unchanged. The USDA predicted an even higher corn acreage than was expected, and Trump’s tariffs duly arrived in the shape of a strangely contrived formula that took analysts days to unravel. Agri commodities certainly held up better than stock markets on Friday, if the pressure on stocks and oil continues this week it will be difficult for our markets to continue defying gravity. That said, there remains a sense that we are now in for an extended period of horse-trading with many deals being struck to lessen the impact of the measures.

Weather conditions are near perfect for the UK and much of north-western Europe with spring crops getting away to an ideal start, we are getting a bit dry in the south and south-east but there is now some rain in our forecast due to land with perfect timing on the Easter break ( who would have guessed that ? ). At home there is still an apparent lack of urgency around selling old crop despite the much bigger harvest advancing towards us this year. If we continue in this vein the UK will see the 2024 crop, one of its smallest crops of recent years, result in a record carry over stock in July.  It’s a strange state of affairs which is not adequately explained just by increased imports, despite the publicity around that subject in recent days.

We will be delving into all these topics this week in more detail at the Shoreham users event in Arundel on Thursday morning. We’ve expanded the seating plan to get everyone into this very popular event so there is still time to register, if you would like to join in give us a call on the desk before Thursday.

Have a good week.