Weather and Market Commentary: February 8, 2010

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Weather and Market Commentary: February 8, 2010

February 8, 2010 by sabrina829

Monday, February 8, 2010:

This morning we are finishing up what has been close to a ten-day rainfall event for corn and soybean growing areas of Argentina, and as you might suspect with such a lengthy rainfall event, we have seen some very big totals. The week of January 31 to February 6 brought at least an inch of rain to basically all of the main Argentine growing area, but the heart of their growing area had rains that exceeded four inches during that period. Given the time of year that it is, one has to assume that those rains added a lot of bushels to this year’s Argentine corn and soybean crops. Looking ahead is more favorable weather for Argentina, with a light rainfall threat for mid-week and a better rainfall threat for next weekend. Weather this year for Argentina has been like “night and day” as compared to the historic drought that cut deeply into their crop sizes a year ago. Weather for Argentina is important through at least mid-March (due to the importance of their double-crop soybean acreage), but everything is in place for them to have very big crops this year. Stress has been seen as of late on crops in southern Brazil and neighboring Paraguay. It has been about two weeks since those areas have had a real good rain, and we saw a fair amount of 100 degree temperatures last week (as well as yesterday). Huge rains in the first three weeks of January meant that soils were wet going into this hot/dry spell, but rains are now badly needed…and they are on the way. Satellite photos early on this Monday showed thunderstorms starting to move into Rio Grande do Sul of Brazil, and those rains will spread across all of southern Brazil for today and tonight. For the middle of this week through early parts of next week, it looks like a situation where there will be a daily threat of rainfall for the area in question, so you can assume that some big amounts of rain will eventually fall. All of the rain will make temperatures this week a lot cooler than last week as well. We saw strong gains in the corn and soybean markets overnight, but those gains are not to be tied to weather concerns in South America.