Grains soar on China

Grain prices soared on Friday at the start of the new year with a single reason cited: Chinese demand.
Meanwhile, commodity markets like oil and gold traded in New York stayed shut on Friday for a long New Year's break.
At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, live cattle for February delivery rose 0.275 cent a pound on Friday to 73.800.
That contract had closed at 90.675 cents on December 23, before the US Agriculture Department announced that a single Holstein dairy cow in Washington state had mad cow disease.
The news has rocked the $27 billion cattle industry, the single largest sector of US agriculture. More than two dozen nations have halted US beef imports, which account for about 10 percent of annual production and $3.2 billion in sales.
That backwash of supplies now hangs over the US market.
"I think it's going be volatile. I wouldn't say that this is the turn and we are going higher. I think this is more reflecting the volatility," said Jim Robb, economist with the Denver-based Livestock Marketing Information Center.
"If you drop anything from a significantly high level it will bounce," added Dan Vaught, analyst at A.G. Edwards.
Vaught pointed to continued weakness in US domestic prices for wholesale beef, which fell again on Friday and are down about 10 percent since news of the mad cow case. "I think the market will be weak next week because of the sliding wholesale beef prices," Vaught said.
But restaurant chains like McDonalds Corp have said that consumer demand for beef appeared to be holding steady amid the scare over mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a fatal disease caused by misshapen proteins called prions, which can be spread by eating contaminated meat.
"We have not seen any clear fundamental decline in consumer demand for beef," Robb said.
On Friday, the USDA said that exporters reported a switch of 105,000 metric tons of spring wheat sales to China from "unknown destinations." That followed Tuesday's news that a team of Chinese wheat buyers will visit the United States.
China, which has been exporting corn in recent years and taking away US market share in places like South Korea, was also rumoured on Friday to have bought up to four cargoes of US corn.