US temperatures will be ideal for crop progress across the eastern and central corn belt while the western corn belt will continue to see relatively warm to hot conditions for the week ahead.
The higher temps across the HRW belt should allow harvest to wind up quickly. In the weekly crop progress report out after the close USA winter wheat harvest was pegged at 69% complete with Kansas all but done. Only the very north of the winter wheat growing areas in the US are now lagging behind.
Spring wheat condition in the US remained stable at 76% good to excellent, 3% moved from good to excellent, so the recent rainfall has made the better crops better.
The corn condition rating in the states was back 1% from 58% G/E to 57%. This probably isn’t a big enough reduction to trigger any panic buying in the futures market. Technically last night’s sell off in Chicago corn futures starts to push the chart into oversold territory so potentially we should see support creep in at these levels. 400c/bu does seem to be the magic number for corn this year.
As for SRW at Chicago it is now well oversold but it’s hard to predict a technical bounce when US values on the export front remain uncompetitive. At an FOB level US wheat remains around US$30 above Black Sea wheat, so to buy volume into the Middle East is unlikely for the USA. Lucky for the US Australian wheat exports into Asia are lower in 2019.