Chicago | Reuters — U.S. corn and soybean futures steadied on Tuesday after the market rallied sharply at the end of last week on concerns that hot and dry weather will lead to harvest shortfalls.
The market remained underpinned by the most recent forecasts, which remained unfavourable for key growing areas of the U.S. Midwest, traders said.
“The massive pattern shift we expected into the end of this month has not happened, while temperatures hold safely above normal now through June and right up into the beginning of the key month of July,” StoneX chief commodities economist Arlan Suderman wrote in a research note.
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The wheat market was mixed, with the most-active Chicago Board of Trade soft red winter wheat contract hitting its highest in more than two months.
But poor export demand for U.S. supplies weighed on the K.C. hard red winter wheat and MGEX spring wheat contracts.
Algeria’s state grains agency OAIC is believed to have bought around 630,000 metric tons of milling wheat largely expected to be sourced from Russia in an international tender.
Large Russian exports have tempered worries over the possible breakdown of a Black Sea corridor agreement allowing shipments from war-torn Ukraine, which Moscow has repeatedly threatened to quit next month.
CBOT July soft red winter wheat settled up 7-3/4 cents at $6.95-3/4 a bushel after peaking at $7, the highest for the most-active contract since April 19.
CBOT December corn was unchanged at $5.97-1/2 a bushel and CBOT November soybeans were 1/2 cent higher at $13.42-3/4 a bushel.
After the close, the U.S. Agriculture Department said that good-to-excellent ratings for corn fell six percentage points in the latest week to 55 per cent. Good-to-excellent ratings for soybeans stood at 54 per cent as of June 18, five percentage points less than a week earlier.
— Reporting for Reuters by Mark Weinraub in Chicago; additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris and Matthew Chye in Singapore.
