The forecast in the USA has turned wet again. With Tuesday’s crop progress report suggesting just 60% of US soybeans had been sown up to the end of the week prior. This leaves soybeans exposed to acreage cuts similar to what we have seen in US corn acres.
The strength in US soybean futures saw spill over buying in both the corn and soft wheat pits at Chicago. Hard wheat futures were less affected while spring wheat futures actually slipped a little.
The forecast is for 2.5″to 5″ of rain across NE Oklahoma, Missouri, central and southern Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Looking at the crop progress report quickly shows that these 4 states are already lagging behind the most when compared to other states.
The additional rain also enhances to risk of disease in the wheat crop. Across these four states around 80% of the soft wheat crop is in head. These four states produce less than 10% of US winter wheat crop, most of it being soft red winter wheat, around 3mt.

The seven day outlook hasn’t improved for the Volga Valley and the spring wheat districts of Russia and Kazakhstan either. With little to no rain predicted for the next seven days and temperatures now into the 30C’s conditions are deteriorating fast. It was interesting to see the USDA increased Russian production by 1mt to 78mt in this week’s report. Ukraine was also increased 1mt to 30mt. Conditions have generally been favourable or average for the winter wheat regions of Russia while parts of NE Ukraine have been drier than normal while the rest of the country has been average to a little wetter than average around Crimea.