Snippets

There's no overnight market this morning and there won't be any trade in Chicago tonight due to the US Independence Day holiday. So it looks like a quiet day is in store.

Whether we have a quiet week is entirely another matter with the USDA out on Friday with their July crop production and ending stocks estimates. Taking last week's surprises into account they should cut old and new crop corn ending stocks sharply, but wheat stocks should rise.

This is the USDA we are talking about here of course, it's entirely possible that they might raise projected 2010 corn yields sufficiently high to completely erase last week's projected acreage reduction.

The Indian weather office say that monsoon rains there are 14% down on normal for the June 1st-July 4th period. According to a story on Dow Jones Newswires this morning "light rains lashed India's grainbowl northern region over the weekend". Come again, light rains don't lash anything do they?

The Kazakh weather office, Kazhydromet, say that July will start off hot and dry for the first ten days of the month. After that temperatures will dip to 1-2C below normal for the time of year with "normal" rainfall.

Algeria will harvest 5-5.5 MMT of grain this year, according to the Ag Ministry, that would be around 10-18% lower that last season. Harvesting there is 21% complete, they added.

Farmers in South Australia are optimistic for the coming season after 15-30mm of rain fell in the last few days of June. Mice infestations of "plague proportions" and dormant locust eggs waiting to hatch are keeping them on their toes however.

There should be more widespread early harvest reports filtering through from France and southern Germany this week, which will likely decide the fate of EU grain prices for the week ahead.

There are concerns that the recent hot and dry spell will have accelerated maturity at the expense of yield.

Rain in the north and west of the UK over the last few days will have helped crops there, but not much seems to have fallen in the major growing areas to the south and east, and there isn't much in the forecast for those areas for the week ahead either.

Carat winter barley was apparently harvested on Saturday near Marksbury, near Bath at 14% moisture and yielding 8.6 MT/ha, according to Farming Online today.