You know what makes this job hard. The media, almost every story that hits the wires needs to be proofed now. For instance a headline today read “Russian wheat sowings threatened by dry weather”. So the first thing you do is cross check it to the weather maps and the reported sowing progress pace. The weather map shows 25 – 75 mills have fallen across much of the Russian wheat country in the last 14 days after what was generally a fairly wet period during grain fill, hence the record wheat harvest they are experiencing. The next step is to look at sowing progress, last week it was pegged at 60%, just over 10mha. So it’s hard to take a headline like that seriously. What the report should have read was “German and French corn yields reduced on warm dry finish”.

In the US the crop progress report hit the wires after the close. There’s no change to the corn and soybean rating. We can only assume that the rainfall of the last couple of weeks has not dented the national prospects and the regions affected are small enough not to make a major difference. Winter wheat sowing in the States is at 30%, bang on the five year average.
The six to ten day forecast for the US shows those locations that got a little too wet last week should dry out this week allowing harvest to crank up again by the weekend. This saw an increase in both speculative and grower selling in futures putting pressure on prices.