This is the SFN Market Report with Brooks Schaffer of Palmetto Grain. Reach him at [email protected] or 843-540-4540.

It’s been another quiet week in the grain markets, with low volume and no enthusiasm. Soybeans have been trading sideways after the big sell-off Friday and Monday. Argentina announced a temporary suspension of the export tariff for some agricultural commodities. Argentina is trying to recover from the latest episode of hyperinflation and desperately needs to get its financial house in order. Or at least stop digging the hole deeper, so a condition of the tariff relief was that 90 percent of the dollars must be sold on the currency exchange within 72 hours.

According to news reports, China bought between 20 and 38 cargoes of soybeans from Argentina over the last three days. That could be as much as 91 million bushels. The real kicker is that most of the shipments were for near-term delivery this fall and early winter. That is at the end of their crop year, when Argentina should be least likely to export, and is right in the middle of our new crop, where we need to be doing the export business. Some South American traders said they would not be surprised to see U.S. soybean exports go to Brazil and Argentina to make up for the old-crop beans sent to China.

We can assume that this will happen at lower prices if we have no Chinese demand for our exports. We have not seen much progress on trade with China, and the window for our exports is closing. If Brazil gets planted on time, they will have new-crop beans available for shipment by January.

Harvest was slowed down this week by rain over parts of the Midwest. The moisture was too little, too late to help the crop. Yield reports remain mixed. There are some good yields but also a lot of disappointment. Overall, we expect yield on corn to continue to be trimmed, but with the increased acres, the crop size is not going to be a lot lower than what the market had priced in. And that was assuming some very good demand. We need to keep demand robust to keep the market supported.

The Trump administration has not helped us out with biofuel policy. There have been so many new rules and then reversals, we still do not know what their biofuel policies are.

We will get USDA’s Quarterly Stocks report next Tuesday, Sept. 30, at noon. That will give us the final count of old-crop stocks, which will go into the new-crop balance sheet as the carry-in. The next supply and demand update will come out Oct. 9. There will be some harvest data included in USDA’s updated estimates on the October WASDE.