Widespread rains delay soya harvest in Brazil's center-west

Heavy rains since Tuesday in Brazil's top soya producing state of Mato Grosso are impacting harvesting in the region and could hurt the quality of the crop, agronomists said on Friday.
Farmers institute Imea said the soya harvest in Mato Grosso was 11.9 percent complete on Friday, an advance of more than 6 percentage points over the past week.
Although the crop is well ahead of schedule versus last year, more progress had been expected in the past week as a large part of the fields are mature and ready for harvest.
"We were looking to reach around 15 percent of the area at this point but we had several days with a lot of rain and the machines could not get into the fields," Angelo Ozelame, an Imea agronomist, said.
Mato Grosso is Brazil's largest soya and corn producer. It is expected to produce 30 million tonnes of soyabeans in the current season, almost as much as Illinois and Iowa combined.
That volume should help Brazil produce a record estimated crop of 103.8 million tonnes this season.
Farmers managed to plant soya earlier in the seeding period thanks to ample humidity and so are harvesting the crop earlier this season.
"It's been raining everyday since Tuesday," grains analyst F?bio Meneghin, who is overseeing a crop tour through the region this month, said. According to him, few machines have been spotted in the soya fields this week.
The weather is starting to concern farmers since mature grains that are exposed to prolonged periods of rain can spoil. Farmers will watch for that closely in the next days, agronomists said.
"There are no reports of losses due to rains so far. The problem is that the forecast is for more rains in the next days," meteorologist Marco Antonio dos Santos said.