Corn futures were pretty flat on Tuesday, basically unchanged by end of day. Caught some interesting moves though - the nearby cash corn ticked up a quarter cent to $4.05, and I noticed the May contracts gained a bit while March was down. Pretty typical sideways action for corn trading right now.

USDA dropped some numbers this morning that caught my attention. They reported a private export sale of 196,000 MT heading out, which is decent volume. But here's the thing - their grain crushing report showed only 460.95 million bushels used for ethanol in January. That's actually lower than expected and down about 1.5% from last year. The corn market has been digesting this kind of data all morning.

Saw some activity from South Korean importers overnight too - they picked up around 133,000 MT total across a couple tenders. Not huge, but it adds to the overall picture. Looking at the corn futures board, May contracts closed up a quarter cent at $4.46, July was up three quarters of a cent at $4.55. Nothing dramatic, but the corn news keeps flowing in and traders are watching these signals pretty closely. Typical Tuesday in the corn pits - steady but with enough movement to keep things interesting.