EU Grains Close - Thursday

Posted by Nogger - a legend in his own mind at 17:07 | Categorized as

18/08/11 -- EU grains finished lower, unable to resist the negative influence of outside markets any longer.

London's FTSE100 ended the day down 4.5%, whilst Germany's Dax lost 5.8%, adding to Asian losses overnight as global market jitters returned. UK retail sales data for July was poor, showing a rise of only 0.2% from June and unchanged year-on-year.

The HGCA estimated the UK wheat harvest at 50% done, saying that "yields are improving as more crops are harvested, but are still below the 5 year average.
The average yield to date is 7.3-7.7 t/ha."

Winter barley harvesting is 95% done and winter OSR 90% complete, they added.

There appears to be an interesting story developing out of Russia with the Federal Weather Centre reporting that the country will harvest in excess of 90 MMT of grains this season off 44 million hectares.

The reason that this raises my interest is that the Ministry yesterday reported the harvested area so far at 17.2 million hectares, or 39%, which is 39% of 44 million ha. They also reported the harvested tonnage thus far at 48.5 MMT.

Now that would suggest a final grain harvest way in excess of 100 MMT. I'll report more on this one next week, but I seem to recall that in the post-Soviet era bumper production year of 2008 (108 MMT), the Ministry were trotting out what subsequently proved to be extremely low production estimates as late as August of that year.