OTTUMWA — The soybean market dropped so low last week, local grain elevators put a hold on bids to farmers.

Last week in the period running from Feb. 29 to March 7, soybeans were down by $1.28 a bushel.

“It has been a declining market for the past couple weeks,” said Iowa State University Extension Field Specialist Mark Carlton. “When the market gets that low, grain elevators get scared and they will not accept any bids, because they are afraid by Monday it will go even lower.”

That’s exactly what happened.

Last Friday, area grain elevators withheld bids on soybeans, due to the extremely low market.

While the market can only drop 50 cents at a time over the course of one period — $1.28 is a lot.

“If you look at it from the standpoint of them selling $100,000 at a dollar loss that is quite a bit of loss,” Carlton said.

Farmers Co-op Grain Elevator Office Manager Deb Swan said Friday that the DTN (a satellite network) indicated that the market had dropped more than $1.

“This put producers at a standstill until Monday, because we aren’t accepting any bids until we see what it does then,” she said.

Beans, which have been running around $14 before last week, dropped to $13.51 on Thursday. At that point the markets were still open and the elevators were still accepting bids. However, on Friday, the prices dropped even lower to a “low max,” which closed the bidding to local elevators until Monday.

The closing comments from another grain elevator in Ainsworth, which comes from the Chicago Board of Trades stated: Beans were 50 lower, which is the limit. Profit taking and Funds Liquidating contracts were the reason for the sharp losses. In beans there was big news of China releasing bean oil reserves to alleviate supply shortages, which aided in the market slide.”

“I don’t really know what the China thing has to do with it,” Carlton said. “But I know that when the market gets too low that is when the grain elevators will stop buying to protect themselves against a bigger loss.”

Swan said it’s not common for elevators to withhold bids, but it can happen occasionally when the market gets too high and then drops suddenly, like it has been in the past several weeks.

Monday, elevators resumed bidding for soybeans, even though the market was still “not back up to normal.”

“The market has jumped back up some, but it is still not at a good price,” a employee of Farmer’s Co-op said Monday. “We have started taking bids again.”