Rains help late-planted Argentine soy and corn

BUENOS AIRES: Late-planted Argentine soy and corn benefited from fresh rains over the last week although the showers slowed harvesting of some early-seeded fields, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange said on Thursday.

The South American country is a top exporter of both crops at a time of rising global food demand and supply concerns caused by weak grains harvests in breadbaskets Russia, the United States and Australia.

The exchange expects Argentina to harvest 48.5 million tonnes of soy in the current 2012/13 season and a record harvest of 25 million tonnes of corn.

Recent showers arrived too late for soybeans planted in some northern parts of Argentina where yield and area losses have already been recorded due to the dryness, the report said.

The rains also came late for early-planted soy in the central Pampas farm belt, it added.

"In January and the first half of February, when early-planted soy was in its key yield-defining stages, the lack of water was exacerbated by high temperatures," the exchange said in its weekly crop report.

"But late-planted fields sown on the remains of wheat or barley crops have been helped by showers that have fallen over recent weeks, as water was available just at the time when plants' demand for water was at its highest," it added.

Soy harvesting has just begun in Argentina, the world's No. 1 exporter of soymeal, used as animal feed, and soyoil, used in the booming international biofuels sector.

The country's 2012/13 corn crop is 8.4 percent harvested, advancing 2.2 percentage points during the week through Thursday, slightly outpacing the previous season's tempo. Nearly 2.5 million tonnes of corn have been harvested so far.

"New rains over the last seven days in the central farm belt - including parts of Santa Fe, Entre Rios, Buenos Aires and La Pampa provinces - slowed down the harvesting of commercial-use corn," the report said.

Those same rains however replenished soil moisture in corn farming areas that went dry in January and February.

"This favors the development of late-planted corn, which is now in critical stages of development," the exchange said. "If yields are to suffer from the January-February dry period, these showers will help limit the losses."