Following our post (Wheat Weather) the other day regarding the devastating flooding across eastern Australia, we encourage readers to follow the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) to monitor conditions in the region through January.  The map below depicts the Dec2010 SPI, and it will be worth noting the changes when the Jan2011 index is released.

( map [...]

Author: Michael Ferrari, PhD
VP, Applied Technology & Research
The Agricultural Outlook Americas conference was held in Boston this week.  This year’s event brought together a mix of growers, investors and technologists, with discussions ranging from  new investments on the farm to currency hedges.  The three day event contained too many interesting discussion [...]

Author: Michael Ferrari, PhD
VP, Applied Technology & Research
Corn futures are trading at a 2 year high with analysts becoming more concerned about tight carryover stocks into 2011.  While harvest progress this season has been favorable, mid crop weather conditions limited crop development, which was underscored by USDA’s significant revision (4% downward) on the crop size [...]

Author: Michael Ferrari, PhD
VP, Applied Technology & Research
Readers of our weekly reports know that, while Weather Trends has been expecting good numbers for US corn production in 2010, our view has not been as optimistic as USDA or most of the other analysts that we follow.  The long range forecast that we developed for the [...]

Author: Michael Ferrari, PhD
VP, Applied Technology & Research
Readers of this column should no doubt be aware of our bias towards the importance of India with respect to the amount of physical sugar that is available to the world market at any given time.  We have stated numerous times that the sub-optimal pattern with respect to [...]

Author: Michael Ferrari, PhD
VP, Applied Technology & Research
Wheat continues to dominate news in the grains/oilseeds space – this time the focus is Australia.  Eastern Australia has benefited from a favorable patter over the last several months, but the western wheat belt has been stuck in a persistent dry pattern.  In a Bloomberg article today, the [...]