March 16, 2012

 

EU 2012 winter grain forecast down

 

 

Strategie Grains on Thursday (Mar 15) cut its estimate for all EU winter grain harvests in 2012 due to a cold snap early this year, which should prompt farmers to resow some of their land with spring crops, as well as a drought in Spain.

 

The French analyst trimmed by 1.6 million tonnes to 131.1 million its forecast of the bloc's 2012 soft wheat output, still up 1% on the year, and cut by 1.2 million its barley crop estimate at 53.4 million tonnes, now 3% above the 2011 total.

 

The 27-member bloc's durum crop this season was now expected at 8.4 million tonnes, down 400,000 tonnes from last month but still 2% above last year.

 

Strategie Grains said most of the winterkill damage for wheat and barley had occurred in France, Germany and southeast Europe. In France, the EU's largest grain grower by far, the analyst said winterkill had hit between 5-20% of the winter cereal area, mainly in eastern France.

 

"Losses on this scale are highly unusual in France. They can be attributed to the very exceptional circumstances so far this crop year: abnormally mild weather through the autumn and early winter and then the late plummeting of the mercury," it said.

 

The analyst said it was too early to fully assess the extent of damage in the second-largest producer, Germany, but it was likely be lower than in eastern France. However, if temperatures continued to swing below and above zero, the scale of damage could rise, the analyst said.

 

The south eastern European countries most hit by cold weather were Romania and Bulgaria, where crops had already been weakened by a severe drought in the autumn. Winter rapeseed fields were the most severely impacted, Strategie Grains said.

 

However, overall, it expected the cold weather in Europe to have little impact on the remaining plants' final yields due to their capacity to compensate. It kept its average yield estimates for the EU soft wheat and barley crops unchanged at 5.8 tonnes and 4.4 tonnes per hectare respectively.

 

However, Strategie Grains stressed that grain crops could suffer in the coming weeks if the dry weather hitting many parts of Western Europe were to last.

 

"With a severe drought already affecting Spain and Portugal and other countries in west Europe facing drought warnings, the weather outlook is worrisome," it said.

 

"Yield potentials could be very negatively impacted if rains do not materialise soon, especially given that the plants are already fragile in many places as the winterkill was greater than normal and as groundwater reserves have suffered from the 2011 drought," it also said in the report.

 

The drought in Spain already accounts for 500,000 tonnes of Strategie Grain's cut in its EU barley crop estimate and 300,000 tonnes for durum. The analyst noted that Spain had seen the lowest cumulative level of rainfall between September and February since 1990 but it stressed that grain yields would be mainly determined by rainfall levels in April and May.

 

In France, February was especially dry, boosting a rainfall deficit that was now greater than at this time in 2011, it said. Last year, what was recorded as the driest spring in a century in France cut final output, although rainfall later in the season allowed plants to recover some of the damage so that final yield losses were limited to 6%.

 

The dry conditions in France made restrictions on early irrigation increasingly likely, which could discourage farmers from sowing corn, Strategie Grains said. Still, the switch to spring crops in Europe would benefit corn in the bloc, which prompted the analyst to lift its 2012 crop estimate by two million tonnes to 64.6 million tonnes, still 1% below last year.