eCBOT Close, Early Call

The overnight markets closed firmer, with front month beans 11 3/4 cents higher and the deferreds around 4-7 cents firmer. Wheat and added around 1-2 cents.

Cool and wet weather in upper Midwest will do little to help crop development there, keeping old-crop stocks tight right up to the wire.

News of Argy farmers staging their third strike of the year, will just add a little bit of extra tightness, especially with Brazilian farmers 90% sold according to Celeres. Incidentally they've already got more than 10% of new crop sales tucked away before the crop is even planted.

Today's USDA weekly export sales numbers were huge for beans, coming in at over 2 MMT, much better than anticipated, with China (remember them, they're shutting the book any day now, everybody knows that) confounding the sheep by taking a hefty 1.5 MMT of that.

Egypt bought 60,000 MT of US wheat last night and Japan has bought 160,000 MT of mostly US wheat today, also today's export sales of 652,700 Mt were a marketing year high, as too were physical exports.

Corn export sales were in line with expectations of between 800,000 and 1,150,000 MT at 973,200 MT.

There are still fairly widespread reports of significant losses to still to be harvested corn crops in Ukraine and Russia. If that proves to be true, then that will take care of some of the lower quality wheats that are around.

The German Ag Ministry say that the wheat crop there this season will not come in as high as some private estimates have been projecting. Their first estimate, with harvesting just about finished, is 24.8 MMT. Quality is pretty good although yields and protein levels appear to have suffered from persistent rains in July and early August.

Argy wheat plantings are said to be complete at 2.75 million hectares by the Buenos Aires Cereals Exchange, that's a 40% decrease on last season. Corn plantings are also seen sharply lower, down almost 20% to just 2 million hectares. Soybean plantings look set to be somewhere in the 18.5-20 million hectare area. The largest area on record to date is 16.6 million.

For soybeans this afternoon I'd look for a further widening of the old crop/new crop spread, despite a promising longer term outlook for record production from South America we aren't there yet.

Wheat I think will draw support from beans, decent export sales and nervous shorts who may look to get out whilst they're still in profit.

Corn could be the poor relation of the three.

Early calls for this afternoon's CBOT session: corn called 1 to 2 higher; September beans up 8-12, November beans 5 to 7 higher; wheat 4 to 5 higher.