Rains help Argentina's freshly planted soya

Growing conditions in Argentina's main soya belt were helped over the previous seven days by showers in areas that had suffered from a lack of ground moisture, the Buenos Aires Grains exchange said on Thursday in its weekly crop report. "Rain in the central and southern agricultural area improved moisture levels in southeast Buenos Aires, where conditions had been overly dry during the last month," the report said.
The exchange kept is estimate for the recently planted 2016/17 soyabean crop unchanged at 54.8 million tonnes. Argentina is the world's No 1 exporter of soyameal livestock feed. The exchange also kept its 2016/17 corn crop estimated unchanged at 37 million tonnes, saying the rainy weather had helped that crop as well. A change in tax policies in late 2015 led to a vast expansion of corn planting in Argentina, with this year's harvest expected to be 23 percent bigger than in the 2015/16 crop year, according to the exchange.