US grain futures traded higher on their domestic weather forecast yet again. Hot dry weather is predicted for the last week of July. Now to put a shroud of reality over this we should probably have a look at the USDA weekly crop condition report that came out last night. Corn for instance is rated at 76% good to excellent. The last time US corn was rated this high in mid to late July was in 2014 and that year was a year with record yields. With the vast majority of the US corn crop now in the later stages of or finished flowering one could safely assume that corn will see little damage from a few days of hot dry weather during the last week of July. Considering it’s sat in mud most of the season I don’t think heat now is an issue, late season standability maybe, but heat unlikely.
Wheat in the US, well winter wheat is basically in the bin with all the major producing regions winding up leaving those in the far north of the US as the last to come in. The spring wheat crop in the US and Canada is looking good, that includes durum. Durum values around the Canadian border are starting to slip too, back 4-6c/bu yesterday.
That leaves soybeans as the crop most likely to see some kind of damage from this “heatwave”. So we’ll give the punters a week or two to push the oilseed market around and then even that will most likely be out of harm’s way in the US baring a pre harvest monsoon. In other news Egypt picked up 300k of Romanian and Russian wheat. Headers are in the fields in France so we should see some yield and quality reports this week.