Don Roose of U.S. Commodities took a recent trip to South America and saw firsthand what the crop conditions looked like. Given the size of South America’s growing area, there’s a variety of conditions ranging from too wet to very dry in parts of Brazil and Argentina.
It’s a big country, from Brazil down to Argentina, so you have everything, I would say, probably as big an issue as the dryness in southern Brazil and in northern Argentina – which is a hot, dry pattern there may be stabilizing, but we’ll see – it’s the weather in the north. To put it in perspective, the roads are not the nice plush roads that we have here – gravel. There are a lot of dirt roads, and those roads, when it rains, get muddy. So, that is an issue.”
He says soybean harvest was recently slowed down by the wet weather.
“The harvest slowed down greatly because of that, but picking up momentum now, and the producers there, I would say, probably are somewhere around 15 percent, maybe a little bit more, of the farms have storage, and so, there’s a great need for banks right now, silo bags, and kind of a shortage of those bags at present. It looks like the early yields were a little bit poor but are starting to pick up, improving now. It looks like we’re going to get some drier forecasts going forward and maybe some rain in southern Brazil and Northern Argentina. So, I would say the harvest weather is improving.”
While harvest started slowly, it’s still going to be a big crop.
“You talk about yields, there’s a lot of 60-to-70-bushel yields, you know, is what you’re looking at. So, it’s not like your 40-bushel yields, but the bottom line, I think you’re still talking about a soybean crop that is 170 million metric tons in Brazil. Well, that’s a 6.2-billion-bushel crop.”