Checking in on South American production

Though temperatures across the Midwest over the past several days have felt more spring like than anything else, we here in the U.S. are still in the dead of winter. That means as far as agriculture is concerned, much of the global focus continues to be in the Southern Hemisphere and, more specifically, in Brazil and Argentina.

Today, we’re going to give a quick update on the crop prospects here and look at where things stand as the calendar flips to February.

We’ll start in Brazil, where the season is further along than in Argentina.

Looking first at weather, conditions have been nearly perfect throughout much of the country, which has produced better-than-expected yields on the early soybeans harvested in the past couple weeks.

Farmers have seen the abundant moisture as a blessing through the...