Nogger's Blog

24/11/11 -- They say that you can't turn the clock back don't they? Even though that's rubbish because you can quite easily in reality can't you, you just pick it up and turn it back and it's done.

So I thought well what else is there to do on a no news day than turn the clocks back twelve months? As my mucker Jonathan Waterhouse has just pointed out things were very different back then, the polar opposite in fact.

Twelve months ago tomorrow it started to snow big time, the earliest widespread snowfall for 17 years, according to the BBC. This year we've just had the warmest October on record and November hasn't exactly been icy either.

Cows are still out in the daytime in many parts and winter feeding doesn't really seem to have got going.

As Jonathan said, this time last year we were looking at prices going up on a daily basis and wondering how high they would end up, today it's just the opposite.

Jan London wheat was GBP171.50/tonne on this day in 2010, en-route to ending the year just 50p short of the magical GBP200.00/tonne mark. Currently we're almost GBP30.00/tonne lower than were we were on 24/11/10 and if we keep on doing the opposite to last year we'll be at GBP114.00/tonne by the year end!

This week last year Jan London wheat posted the highest front month close for 2 1/2 years, and now we're recording near 18 month lows.

This time last year Europe had exported 9.6 MMT of soft wheat, up until last week that total was 5.8 MMT this time round.

A line from a market report on the blog back then: "The USDA announced the sale of two cargoes of US SWW wheat sold to Egypt, reaffirming the notion that US wheat is cheaper than anything else around at the moment." Well that's certainly changed quite a bit.

What hasn't changed a great deal is currency. The pound was 1.1850 against the euro and 1.5740 against the dollar twelve months ago. We were all fretting about the PIGS then, and they're still causing all the problems 12 months later.