Heavy rains in Argentina's farm belt are delaying the incipient 2010/11 corn and soya harvests, after unseasonal dryness earlier this year rattled the sector, a specialist in crop weather said on Thursday. Argentina is the world's third-biggest soyabean exporter and its No 2 corn supplier. Farmers start gathering both crops in earnest in March and April.
Despite immediate concerns about too much moisture, forecasts show rains will cease over the next few days and the weather will return to more predictable patterns, following unseasonal variations ascribed to the La Nina phenomenon. "Farmers want to harvest and at the moment they can't," said Eduardo Sierra, a crop weather specialist at the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange. "It causes a lot of worry about blights, which would drive up costs."
"But weather forecasts indicate it will stop raining until around March 11, almost two weeks from now," Sierra said, adding that dryness still prevails in some specific areas. Corn is being affected more than soya because it tends to be harvested slightly earlier. Corn crops were hard-hit by La Nina because the parched conditions were at their worst between November last year and mid-January, when plants were passing through the crucial, yield-setting pollination stage.
Soya, by contrast, went through its important growth stages once rains had returned, and most of the crop is healthy. "If January and February was a period for replenishing moisture, it seems March and April will be a period of rains," Sierra said. "But the rain won't interfere significantly with the harvest."
Last week, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Oscar Solis predicted 2010/11 soya output at above 50 million tonnes as a result of recent rains. Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange upped its forecast for soya production to 48.8 million tonnes on Thursday.
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