A better outlook for US spring wheat and row crops put some weight on prices last night. The last seven days has seen useful falls along the Mississippi valley and east of the Rockies across western Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. The central corn belt and southern soybean regions also saw some good falls with the Mississippi delta seeing 100 – 200mm in places.
Volume across the Saskatchewan spring wheat belt were less than predicted which has resulted in producers there warning that much more rain is needed in the short term to turn the bad start to the 2021 wheat program around.
The forecast for the week ahead in the USA shows more good falls across the entire Mid-West with potentially heavy rain across much of eastern Kansas and NE Oklahoma, let’s hope not too much of a good thing there.
The USDA weekly US crop progress report shows corn 90% sown, soybeans 75% sown (that’s fast), winter wheat 67% in head, Kansas 84%. The volume of winter wheat rated good to excellent actually declined from 48% to 47%. The trade were guessing a 2% increase week on week not a 1% decline. This may help flatten futures tomorrow. Spring wheat is 94% sown and 66% emerged with a condition rating of 45%, that’s not abysmal but it’s not great, North Dakota dragging the average down.

Egypt picked up 240kt of Romanian wheat in their latest tender at US$277 CFR for August. According to Egypt this should take state held reserves back to 2019 levels of about 7mt, just where they like them and giving the country about 6 months of consumption.