US wheat futures at Chicago found support overnight with both soft and hard wheat contracts closing higher. The punters are square old crop and are backing a big adjustment lower to new crop wheat acres in the states in tonight’s WASDE report. The spat between Iran and the USA took a back seat after both parties appear to be happy with their tit for tat actions.
The prospect of some pretty wild weather in the US also found the markets happy to buy. The weather will probably have little influence on grain area or production given the time of year but with fields already saturated or covered in snow much of the heavy rain will quickly make its way to the river system and could delay grain movement in the short to mid-term.
Cash bids in the states were mixed with basis generally tracking higher in those locations expecting to see a delay in logistics due to the winter weather while corn basis was lower where disruptions were expected to have less of an impact.

In export news Morocco didn’t even get an offer on its request for supply of 350kt of US durum wheat. This has to be seen as bullish international durum values in the short term. Japan picked up 106kt of wheat from the US, Canada and Australia. Western Australian ASW made up just 21.8kt of the order, Canada picked up 25kt of 13.5% spring wheat and the US picked up the balance with 21.3kt of western white wheat and the  balance being HRWW. Egypt announced they have enough wheat to get them through to mid-June, so they should be fairly active buyers over the next couple of months.