US soyabean futures tumbled by the daily trading limit on Monday, posting their biggest percentage drop in 1-1/2 years, on selling sparked by anecdotal accounts of better-than-expected yields in the Midwest farm belt. Corn at the Chicago Board of Trade tumbled to a two-month low while wheat sank 4 percent under the weight of soyabeans, which were considered to be the strongest fundamentally of the three. Soya's stocks-to-use ratio, a measure of demand, was the lowest in nearly five decades.
CBOT November soyabeans fell 70 cents per bushel - the most a contract can move either way on a trading day, as set by the exchange - after accounts that farmers were getting better-than-expected yields in harvesting over the weekend. Some of the better yields were coming from the western Midwest, an area that had remained dry as the worst drought in half a century devastated crops. The northern and eastern parts of the Midwest got beneficial rains in August.
Prices for soyabeans in the cash markets in Iowa, the top corn and soyabean state, fell sharply about two weeks ago, perhaps in an early signal of the better yields being harvested now. Traders also attributed the sell-off to rains in Brazil, the world's second-largest exporter of soyabeans after the United States, as its farmers gear up to plant their crop.
CBOT new-crop December corn sank 4.3 percent to $7.47-1/2 a bushel at 11:18 am CDT (1618 GMT) and touched the lowest price for a nearby contract since mid-July. November soya slid 4 percent to $16.69 a bushel and registered the lowest front-month price since August 20. December wheat fell 4 percent to $8.87-1/4 per bushel.
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