US wheat features end lower

Chicago Board of Trade soft red winter wheat futures fell for the fourth straight day on Thursday as traders locked in positions ahead of the US Agriculture Department's monthly supply and demand report. Expectations for the report to show plentiful wheat supplies also weighed on prices at the Kansas City Board of Trade and MGEX, traders said.
Weak dollar, as well as signs of a pickup in export demand for US supplies, limited the declines in wheat. Egypt, the world's largest wheat importer, bought 60,000 tonnes of US soft red winter wheat for April 21-30 shipment for $259 per tonne plus freight costs of $27.75 per tonne.
USDA said weekly export sales of wheat were 578,100 tonnes, topping forecasts for 300,000 to 500,000 tonnes. Dryness becoming an issue in some hard red winter wheat-growing areas of western Texas, west Oklahoma and Kansas, said Drew Lerner, meteorologist for Global Weather Monitoring.
Chicago Board of Trade said there were three new deliveries against its expiring March contract, bringing the monthly total to 18. There were five deliveries against the Kansas City Board of Trade March and 185 deliveries against the MGEX March contract. Chicago Board of Trade corn futures closed lower on long-liquidation and position-squaring before the release on Friday of USDA's March crop production and supply/demand reports.
USDA's weekly export sales report showed net export sales of US corn during the week ended last Thursday at 505,700 tonnes, near the low end of a range of estimates for 500,000 to 700,000 tonnes. The Buenos Aires Grains Exchange on Thursday revised down its estimate for Argentina's 2011/12 corn harvest to 20.8 million tonnes from a previous forecast of 21.3 million tonnes due to the impact of a drought. Beijing and the influential US Department of Agriculture may have overstated China's corn crop by as much as 14 percent, pointing to higher imports from the world's second-largest consumer of the grain that could squeeze already tightening global supplies. Position-squaring was noted ahead of the release at 7:30 am CST (1330 GMT) on Friday of USDA's March supply/demand and crop production reports.
US and global grain and soyabean stocks are expected to slip during the next 6 months, giving a lift to prices, before big sowings in the United States this spring build stocks and pressure prices, assuming normal weather. Hot and dry weather should prompt the USDA to lower its forecasts of the corn and soyabean crops in South America, moves that would signal increased export demand for US supplies.