Nogger's Blog

18/10/12 -- The overnight electronic market is higher, building on last night's gains, with beans up 17-20 cents and corn & wheat 5-7 cents firmer.

Bargain hunting seems to be the theme all of a sudden. This afternoon's weekly export sales report from the USDA will be interesting. The trade is expecting soybean sales of 650,000-850,000 MT versus 523,700 MT last week. Last week's total may have been adversely affected by a Chinese holiday, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise to me to see a weekly total in excess of 1 MMT today.

China were after all buying beans quite happily at seventeen dollars plus, so today's levels should look like a bargain.

Corn sales on the other hand have been very poor of late. Export sales need to average 420 TMT/week to meet the latest USDA target for 2012/13. It's been 24 weeks since they've managed that (if we ignore the total of unshipped sales carried over from 2011/12 into the first week of the new marketing year).

My chums at MDA CropCast have cut their estimate for world wheat production this year by 1.8 MMT from last week due to acreage adjustments in Australia and FSU. Russia's wheat crop is now pegged at just 37.5 MMT versus 56.0 MMT last year.

French analysts Strategie Grains have cut their EU-27 grain production estimate by 1 MMT from last month to 269.5 MMT, mainly due to a corn crop reduced to 52.8 MMT, more than 20% down on last year's 66.4 MMT.

They also cut their EU-27 soft wheat crop estimate by 700 TMT to 123 MMT versus 128.7 MMT last year. Their UK wheat estimate was lowered 600 TMT to 13.46 MMT with yields at 6.75 MT/ha off 1.99 million ha.

The UK export stats are out for August and for wheat they don't look pretty. In fact they reduce MrsN#1 to a mere "four pinter" - just 26,804 MMT of the best wheat we could muster was shipped out during the month. That brings the 2012/13 marketing year-to-date total to a meagre 65 TMT, versus 282 TMT in the same period in 2011/12.

If we only manage to continue at this rate, and I could easily make you a case out that the monthly totals will in fact decline from here on in, then we would finish 2012/13 shipping just 390 TMT this season versus 2.5 MMT last year.

UK Jul/Aug wheat imports meanwhile were up 164% to 341 TMT vs 129 TMT in 2011/12.

Are you keeping an eye on my new weather maps from another chum at World Ag Weather on the right by the way? The 30 day precipitation map just keeps getting redder and redder, with not just the UK, but northern France, the low countries, Denmark and northern Italy also picking up plenty of moisture. Too much bloody moisture to be frank.

The long term forecast is for a colder and drier than normal winter (Dec/Feb) I understand, there's an interesting video on Dalmark's wonderful GrainPortal.com to that effect if you fancy a shuftie.