Flour Facts

May 1, 2025

Weekly Market Highlights

• Winter wheat condition improved to 49% good/excellent, up 4% from the previous week, matching last year at this time. Heading is 27% complete which is 1% behind last year and 5% ahead of the five-year average. Texas and Oklahoma saw the biggest jumps from the previous week.
• Spring wheat planting progress is at 30% complete—1% behind last year and 9% ahead of the five- year average. Emergence is at 5%.
• Wheat hit a new contract low this week as news from this week’s improved HRW crop condition pressured the market downward. Black Sea area remains dry, but crop production still estimated over 80 million tons.

The impact of millfeed

    Have you ever looked in the Wall Street Journal and saw the futures price of wheat falling but the price of flour remains the same or even rises? Part of the reason can be falling millfeed pricing. When we mill wheat, we utilize the entire wheat kernel, less than 80% is flour but the remaining portion is sold as animal food. This animal food, or millfeed as we call it, competes with other feed ingredients such as corn. If corn prices are low (almost half of all corn grown is used as animal feed), millfeed prices will also be low. That "credit" that we get by selling the millfeed will not be as great thus forcing the price on the flour to go up. Conversely, if corn, or other feed ingredients are higher priced we get a better millfeed recovery, which offsets more of the price of the wheat thus lowering flour prices.

Previous Week Flour Facts

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