Spanish Crop Prospects

Heavy winter and spring rains, whilst causing havoc with widespread flooding at the time, appear to have done this season's Spanish cereal harvest the world of good.

According to the Spanish Cooperative Agro-Food, barley production this season will climb almost 22% to 8.3 MMT, despite farmers planting less of the grain due to depressed domestic prices.

Soft wheat output this year will increase to 4.57 MMT, with oat production of around 1 MMT and rye at just under 270,000 MT also up on last season. The durum wheat crop however will be sharply lower as growers cut back seedings significantly due to large carryover stocks from last season, coming in at just over 850,000 MT, they estimate.

Although they didn't put an estimate on 2010 corn production, they say that spring sowings are down by almost a quarter at 309,000 hectares, from 399,000 in 2009.