Adam DeGroot

@freight_Dogs @rurunlogistics Potatoes are a thirsty crop and groundwater is heavily regulated out west in the big producing states. Underground aquifers are at healthy levels but if snowpack is historically low then the probability of dry conditions hurting yields starts to rise quickly.

@adegroot88 @rurunlogistics Takes more resources to grow them?

Low snowpack out west = Potato prices 📈

@therealgerlach Low snowpack near production areas is an early indicator of dry conditions which could hurt yields. Not a guarantee of anything, reservoirs are in pretty good shape everywhere. Doubt you'll see a change in price on a retail level, potatoes are historically cheap right now!

@adegroot88 Could you explain why? I am not very familiar with potato production. We consume a lot of potatoes in our house. Can we hedge? :)

@JasonHowell10 @BenjaminNething Confident in my prediction that potato prices will be higher in 2026/27, unless they somehow can go negative in ID. I would not put it past them tho 😂

@adegroot88 @BenjaminNething There is enough carryover from the 2025 crop to keep a wet blanket on 2026 prices. Acres will be down though. Potatoes are the primary crop on a lot of farms, it is wheat and barley that won’t get planted.

@petereharrell @IrvingSwisher Marc Rich rolling over in his grave rn

The Trump Administration just authorized Americans to trade Iranian oil for the first time since 1995. It is a remarkable development, and let's unpack it: 1. President Clinton banned US companies from Iran's energy sector in 1995, due to growing concerns about Iran's nuclear program and support for terrorism. US sanctions have expanded steadily essentially ever since, except for the JCPOA nuclear deal that Obama agreed to in 2015 and which Trump withdrew from in 2018. (The JCPOA let non-US companies trade Iranian oil, but US companies were still prohibited). 2. The new Treasury Department/OFAC license authorizes Americans to buy, trade, and deliver Iranian oil that is already loaded and on the water through April 18. It looks like Americans can even pay for it, at least in theory. Still, this is a temporary and limited license. 3. To be sure, I expect no Americans and probably no Europeans will actually trade Iranian oil, between the reputational risks, risk of lawsuits by US victims of Iranian terrorism, the impact of non-US sanctions, and other legal risks. The license probably will, however, provide some reassurance to buyers in China, India, and other countries that they can take whatever Iranian oil is on the market. 4. Iran has continued to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, and indeed Iranian export volumes appear to be slightly higher since the war started than pre-war. The new license should make these barrels a bit more available on the market. It will also mean that Iran gets a somewhat better price for the oil. 5. Trump's action is consistent with his recent "try everything" approach to stabilizing energy prices, including issuing sanctions licenses allowing purchases of Russian oil, the U.S. SPR release, and the IEA member country coordinated release. The volumes don't replace the volumes still bottled up in the Persian Gulf, but it at least sends the market a message that Trump will do what he can to deal with high prices. (In fairness, Democratic and Republican Presidents alike have long been wary of sanctions that could increase oil prices. This expands on that). 6. Yes, it is odd to trade with the enemy during the war--and we should be clear that the license will probably result in more money flowing to Iran at the same time we are bombing them and threatening to seize their oil terminals at Kharg Island. On the other hand, there is a long history of trading with the enemy during wartime--indeed, Congress passed the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1918 precisely to regularize and allow certain trade with the enemy, rather than simply prohibiting all of it. And, at least in the short run, the bombing campaign is doing far more damage to Iran than the benefit Iran is gets from selling more oil (at higher prices). I read the license as consistent with Trump's seeming worldview that sanctions are a secondary policy tool, with military power and trade being his preferred vectors of American power.

Heavy 2008 vibes

Investors are now betting overall US inflation over the next 12 months will surge above 5%. Implied inflation rate from 1 year breakeven, per Bloomberg @business @TheTerminal

@FreightAlley @atutruckers The irony of the ATA strategy is it's probably hurt the margins of their members more than helped. Larger carriers would be able to deal w tighter regulatory requirements than smaller ones.

A decade ago, a CFO of a mega fleet told me I knew nothing about the industry because I called trucking a commodity. Commodities are priced based on supply and demand and truckload services are fungible between motor carriers - I.e. an orange truck provides the same service as a red one. It meets the classic definition. I think the root cause of the ATA’s campaign to a promote a truck driver shortage is a failure to understand the basics of our industry: Capacity is a commodity and truck drivers are the only constraint. If you run a large operator, you want less competition, not more. The ATA should have been advocating for higher barriers to entry, not less.

@TheStalwart We need an odd lots episode on a farm in the corn belt this spring!

Farmers be like, “Mind your Ps ‘n’ Ks”

prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.

Stay safe in Kankakee 🙏

A reminder that the explosion in prices happening right now is still the optimistic, things-resolved-quickly pricing. December oil futures are only up to $74.

This is counterintuitive for some, which is why there’s a paradox named after it. But if you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate. The process goes like this: every small business, every IT team, every large enterprise sees that engineering can now drive vastly more output. They then start to consider all the new things they can build or automate. They even test building prototypes themselves. They only get so far with that approach because they realize there are still 50 other tasks that go into building software and maintaining it. So they start to hire more engineers to do that work. All of this for work they never would have considered automating or having software for if AI didn’t exist. So yes, automating tasks, in plenty of fields, will lead to demand for experts, not less.

Trucking rates could enter a super cycle if The Dalilah Law passes in Congress. A doubling of trucking spot rates would be possible and the effects felt almost immediately with approx 20% of the truck driver population being eliminated. freightwaves.com/news/the-dalil…

I spent 100 hours over the past week researching, writing and editing the piece we just put out. It’s a scenario, not a prediction like most of our work. But it was rigorously constructed, dismissing it outright requires the kind of intellectual laziness that tends to get expensive. And we’ve released it for free. Hopefully you enjoy it. citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

"The top-20 per cent of consumers account for around 65 per cent of sales of products like cookies and ice cream. If those 'super users' end up on GLP-1 drugs, you get a non-linear reduction in sales."

Sales of Heavy Trucks are collapsing, which has usually foreshadowed an upcoming recession 🚨🤯👀

1897: Soybeans arrive in America as ballast in ships returning from Asia. Sailors pack them in the hull for weight, dump them in ports. Farmers discover they fix nitrogen in soil, plant them as cover crops to enrich farmland, then plow them under. Nobody eats them. They're livestock feed at best. 1930s: Chemists figure out they can chemically extract oil from soybeans. The process requires hexane, a petroleum solvent. Heat to 150°C. More chemicals to degum. More heat to neutralise. Bleach to remove the brown colour. Deodorise under vacuum to remove the fishy smell. The oil oxidises instantly when exposed to air. It's rich in polyunsaturated fats that go rancid at room temperature. In nature, this is a protection mechanism: rancid oil deters animals from eating old seeds. We remove this defence with industrial processing, then eat it by the gallon. Post-WWII: The government needs uses for massive soybean surpluses. Industrial machinery retrofitted from wartime production can crack soybeans open at scale. We have technology looking for a market. Meat fats are portrayed as dangerous. Soybean oil becomes "heart-healthy." Today: Soybean oil is in everything. Mayonnaise, salad dressing, processed foods, restaurant fryers. Americans consume 60 pounds per year. It's in your digestive system right now unless you've been extraordinarily careful. Ship ballast became 20% of your caloric intake. Nobody asked if this was wise.