NEW YORK: Brazil, the world’s top coffee producer, is set to have a larger crop in 2023/24 (July-June), but the increase will be modest and far from a record production that some analysts have expected, commodity intelligence company Taka Insights said on Wednesday.

The company, which produces daily crop prediction models using remote sensoring and data from weather stations, projected Brazil’s 2023/24 (July-June) arabica coffee production at 40.68 million 60-kg bags, a small increase from the 2022/23 crop seen at 38.48 million bags that is currently being harvested.

“This might seem surprising to some, who anticipated a much greater recovery due to a few months of well-above-average rainfall, but the NDVI clearly shows the extreme deficit in moisture at the start of the vegetative growth cycle,” said the company in a note sent to Reuters. NDVI stands for Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, a way of measuring green vegetation of trees that is considered efficient to predict production.

Soft commodities analyst Judith Ganes, a co-founder of Taka Insights coffee program, said the data collection is now covering close to 75% of the arabica area in Brazil with daily monitoring.

She said that arabica trees in Brazil are still recovering from a harsh 2021 drought and frosts, so are unable to produce a large crop such as the record output seen in 2020/21 cycle.

Arabica coffee accounts for around two-thirds of total production, with the rest coming from robusta coffee trees.

Taka Insights is still working on mapping the robusta share of the Brazilian coffee production.