Weather forecasts in the US saw futures markets recover somewhat on Thursday night. The hard red wheat belt is looking to continue its current dry spell through to at least the middle of next week when light showers are expected  to cross SE Oklahoma but conditions will remain mostly dry across Kansas and Texas.
There’s not a lot of talk about winter kill in the SRW belt either, which is interesting as initial reports seemed to think somewhere in the vicinity of at least 1 million acres could have been damaged or even lost last week.

There was plenty of action on the global wheat sales front last night too, Algeria picked up 120kt of US hard red wheat as part of a parcel of 480kt all up. More details on that one tomorrow. Saudi Arabia tendered to buy 1.5mt of feed barley for May – June, that’s a solid order and will give the global barley market some much needed direction.

There is talk of demand creeping in from the Mediterranean for durum wheat over the next six weeks. We have seen the 50kt Libya tender rolled to later this month now there is also some talk of Italian business arising. Whether or not this is the blending parcel the trade has been expecting to see get ordered to help make Canadian grain up to milling spec is yet to be seen.