The Fastline Blog

Monday, October 19, 2009:

The weather situation is about the same as it looked back on Friday, which means that the beautiful weather that we are seeing in the Midwest right now will be giving way shortly to more widespread rainfall. All of the Nation’s midsection will be dry on this Monday, but we will start to see rain moving eastward tomorrow and tomorrow night to cover about the northwestern half of the Corn Belt by Wednesday morning. Not until late on Friday is this system out of the western Corn Belt, and does not exit the eastern Corn Belt and Delta until Saturday morning. It should be another solid rain event for basically all of the major corn and soybean growing areas of the Nation, with everyone getting at least a half inch of rain but the vast majority of the locales getting more than an inch and there will be places getting two to three inches. The weekend and the first part of next week will likely not feature much in the way of rain, but I do not view drying conditions in that period as all that good and there will likely be some light showers in especially northern parts of the Corn Belt for late on October 25 to a part of October 26.

There are good indications of a more significant storm system starting around October 28th or 29th. We are getting some crop out of the field as we speak, and there will be another one to two days of fieldwork, but overall we will continue to see the corn and soybean markets concerned about the slow pace of this year’s harvest. I think that we will be at 32 percent done on the national soybean harvest progress number this afternoon, with the corn harvest at 17 percent. Both of those figures would be the lowest in the last 30 years (34 percent on October 18, 1985 is the current 30-year, low- water mark for the soybean harvest, and 22 percent on October 18, 1992 is the current 30-year low for the corn harvest). Current fieldwork will boost those figures for next week’s report, but the fact that we will not get anywhere close to a full week of fieldwork means that the figures will still be alarmingly slow (and very possibly still at or below 30-year lows).

Freese-Notis Weather/Weather Trades, Inc. Des Moines, Iowa Copyright 2009 – All Rights Reserved

To Return to Fastline.com- Click Here