South America Calling

End of Rains Allows Argentine Soy Harvest to Resume

A welcome end to the rain across the Argentine soybean belt has allowed crops to recover and harvest efforts to accelerate, according to the Buenos Aires Cereals Exchange.

Soybean harvesting moved forward eight percentage points to reach 21.4% as of Thursday, said the exchange. But that is still 17.2 points behind last year due to the heavy rain at the start of the month.

According to the report, there have not been significant losses because of the wet weather, with problems restricted to parts of central Buenos Aires, where 5% to 10% losses were registered on some farms, and in eastern and central Entre Rios, where 3% to 5% losses were recorded.

Overall, the exchange saw no reason to alter its crop forecast of 54.5 million metric tons (mmt), which is up 12.4% on the year before.

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According to the Rosario Cereals exchange, rainfall totalled a massive 36 inches in the first 100 days of 2014 in parts of northern Buenos Aires.

Apart from flooding the fields, the deluges limited access to crops. Thankfully, with the easing of the rains over the last nine days, the situation has much improved.

The damp conditions prompted Argentine farmers to leave corn in the field as they concentrated on harvesting soybeans as quickly as possible.

As a result, corn harvesting efforts moved forward just 3 percentage points over the last seven days to 19.7%, according to the Buenos Aires exchange.

Yields from early harvested corn continue to vary widely, ranging from 94 bushels to 153 bushels per acre.

The Buenos Aires exchange forecasts a crop of 24 mmt, a little below that produced last year.

Alastair Stewart can be reached at alastair.stewart@dtn.com

(AG)

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